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The
Lotus Sutra and the Silk Road
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| The
Herzog August Libraly in Wolfenbüttel, Germany |
The "Lotus Sutra and Its World: Buddhist Manuscripts of the Great Silk Road" exhibition, which features 30 exhibits from the prized collection of the St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, opened in the Austrian National Library in Vienna on March 24, and then in the Herzog August Libraly in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, on May 5. The exhibits provide a unique opportunity for researchers to see the original copies of works they have studied for many years in facsimile. These include manuscripts and block prints of Buddhist scriptures dating from as far back as the first century C.E. as well as the famed Petrovsky manuscript and other works of such importance that they can be considered part of humanity's shared heritage.
The exhibition was first shown in Tokyo in November 1998 following a 1996 meeting between the Russian Academy of Sciences' St. Petersburg Scientific Center vice chairperson, Yuri Petrosyan, and SGI President Ikeda.
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| Old-Uighur
manuscript of chapter 25 of the Lotus Sutra. The
collection of the St. Petersburg Branch of the
Institute of Oriental Studies |
The third volume of the Soka Gakkai's Lotus Sutra manuscript series has also been completed. Edited by Klaus Wille, volume three is "Fragments of a Manuscript of the Saddharmapundarikasutra from Khadaliq." Khadaliq is located about 100 kilometers east of Hotan in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in China along the ancient Silk Road that linked the cultures of Asia and the West. The fragments of the Lotus Sutra discovered there are now split between collections in Berlin, Munich and London, but this volume brings the fragments together. It consists of precise color facsimiles, transliteration into Roman script and a concordance, which explains the correlation between different manuscripts.
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