Reviews

Scholarly work on these manuscripts and their publication has, most unfortunately, become the object of controversy and criticism from certain quarters on the ground that they are unprovenanced, a criticism that regrettably failed to take sufficient account of the fact that, whatever the legal ownership of the physical manuscripts, their textual contents are much more than a millennium in age and there can therefore no longer be an issue of intellectual property. [...]due attention was not paid in this criticism to the essential difference between an ancient text contained in a manuscript where the material support birch bark, palm leaf, etc.) and the text are of course clearly distinguishable from each other and an art object or artefact where the material s) and the artistic ``content'' are much less dissociable. [...]in view of the high importance of these texts for Buddhist studies, to have delayed their scholarly study and publication until their provenance could be legally established would have amounted to little less than a dereliction of scholarly duty. The presence in the Schyen collection of this manuscript indicates that a Brahmanical text in classical philosophical style was introduced into the greater Gandhara area, possibly by a travelling Brahmanical scholar, and apparently included in a collection of Buddhist books; the fact that it is written on birch bark would indicate that the manuscript itself is not from central India but of a more northerly origin, as does the script Gilgit-Bamiyan type I). According to the author, this phase in the history of Tibetan Buddhism was steeped throughout in ``Tantrism''.