Sam Khosarvi, People’s Republic of China
Khotanese Asokavadana and its significance in the history of Iranian languages.

Dai Yongbin, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

Khotanese Asokavadana and its significance in the history of Iranian languages.

My intended project is a linguistic-philological research concerning the Khotanese Asokavadana. Khotanese is an eastern middle Iranian language. At the beginning of the 20th Century, two manuscripts of Asokavadana in late Khotanese were recovered. H. W. Bailey transcribed it in Khotanese Buddhist Texts, and gave a provisional translation. However, the Khotanese Asokavadana hasn’t been studied in detail, so I will carry out a complete linguistic-philological research on it.

It is attested that the Khotanese Asokavadana is a paraphrase of Indian and Chinese sources. As to its Sanskrit source, S. Mukhopadhyay published Asokavadana: Sanskrit text compared with Chinese versions, and J. Przyluski published La légende de l’empereur Açoka (Açoka-avadana) dans les texts indiens et chinois. Furthermore, it has two Chinese sources: Ayuwang Zhuan ????, and Ayuwang Jing ????.

My research will consist of four sections.

At first, I plan to make a new edition, commentary, translation, and glossary of the Khotanese Asokavadana. Furthermore, I will deal with the issue of how the Khotanese text was composed, and provide a textual stemma by comparing it with its Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan parallels. Moreover, I wish to probe into Indian and Chinese elements in late Khotanese with the help of a linguistic study on the Khotanese Asokavadana. Last but not the least, based on the above studies, I will clarify the linguistic particularity of late Khotanese, and its significance in the history of Iranian languages.