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ELI FRANCOTHE OLDEST PHILOSOPHICAL MANUSCRIPT IN SANSKRIT1The so-called Spitzer Manuscript (= Sanskrithandschriften aus den
Turfan-Funden 810) was discovered in the Ming-i, Kizil, by the third
Turfan expedition in 1906. It consists of some 1,000 mostly very small
fragments that can be dated palaeographically as belonging to the
Kushana period, i.e. 2nd3rd c. CE. I consider the manuscript to belong
to the 3rd rather than the 2nd c. and date it tentatively ca. 250. Over the
last few years I have been engaged in editing and studying the
manuscript, and I am pleased to announce that the edition is now
completed and expected to be published this year. I have written on the
discovery of the manuscript and previous research on it on other
occasions and there is no need to repeat this here.2 However, now that I
have finalised the edition a general survey of the structure and content
of the manuscript may be useful.What makes this manuscript so valuable is also what makes its text
difficult to reconstruct, namely, its uniqueness. So far no parallels to its
text have been discovered in Tibetan or Chinese translation, nor in any
other language. Consequently, in order to arrange the fragments in their
original order I had to rely exclusively on the fragments themselves.
The method I used is simple to describe though not always easy to carry
out. I singled out those fragments that preserve a folio number and tried
to relate to them as many other fragments as possible. I was fortunate to
be able to combine some of the existing fragments with Moritz
Spitzers transcriptions of fragments that no longer survive, and the
results so far have been gratifying.3 Up to now I have dealt
systematically only with the last part of the manuscript, from folio 369
(where the Spitzer Nachlass begins) till the presumed end around folio
420.4 My investigations into the earlier part of the manuscript were
only to specific sections, e.g. the leaf relating to the Vaieika theory of
guas5 or the one concerning the sixty-four arts and crafts (kal).6
However, recently I have interrupted my attempts further to reconstruct
the manuscript and its contents because I am now awaiting the
announced publication of the hand copies of additional lost fragments