Pratītyasamutpāda, the Doctrine of Dependent Origination in Old Uyghur Buddhism: A Study of Printed Texts

Pratītyasamutpāda, the doctrine of dependent origination, has a long history in Old Uyghur Buddhism. It was first articulated in the Early Old Uyghur Buddhist texts and is evident in the terminology of Maitrisimit and the Daśakarmapathāvadāna-mālā. The dependent origination is systematically illustrated in at least three Pratītyasamutpāda texts, one text with Brāhmī elements, and the other two in Dunhuang and Turfan prints. The latter two are discussed in detail in this paper. The Dunhuang print provides the most comprehensive demonstration of the Old Uyghur understanding of dependent origination. The structure of the text is largely consistent with the corresponding passages in the Abhidharmamahāvibhāṣaśāstra and other Abhidharma texts. The text offers a more comprehensive account than the Chinese text. The Turfan prints, which consist of four fragments, are derived from two distinct prints. Print U 4170 is an Abhidharma text, and it has parallels in the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya. It seems plausible to suggest that the print bearing the abbreviated titles Pratyitasamutpad in Old Uyghur and Buladi 布剌帝 in Chinese may have been translated from a Chinese text sharing the same or a similar Chinese name. However, as with the Dunhuang print, the Turfan prints may have been produced by the Old Uyghurs from some Abhidharma texts. The Dunhuang print and the Tufan prints are unique within the corpus of known Old Uyghur prints. These texts represent the first known printed examples of the Abhidharma tradition. Moreover, the illustration employed in the Dunhuang print is not known in other printed texts discovered in Dunhuang and Turfan, representing the first instance of such an illustration in printed form.