The Bower Manuscript is a collection of seven fragmentary Sanskrit treatises found buried in a Buddhist memorial stupa near Kucha, northwestern China. Written in early Gupta scriptA.F. Rudolf Hoernle (1912), The Bower Manuscript, Facsimile leaves, Nagari transcript, Romanised transliteration and English translation with notes, Calcutta, Aditya Prakashan (Reprinted 2011), ; The Bower Manuscript, AF Rudolf Hoernle (1914), Volume XXII of the New Imperial series of the Archeological Survey of India, British India Press, Chapter 3, Quote: "It is now generally known as Gupta script because its prevalence coincided with the rule of the early Gupta Emperors in whose epigraphic records it is employed." (p. 25) (late Brahmi) on birch bark, it is variously dated in 5th to early 6th century.L Sander (1987), Origin and date of the Bower Manuscript, a new approach, in: M Yaldiz and W Lobo (eds.): Investigating the Indian Arts, Museum für Indische Kunst, Berlin, pp. 313–323 The Bower manuscript includes the oldest dated fragments of an Indian medical text, the Navanitaka.
Of the seven treatises included in the collection, three on Ayurvedic medicine, two on divination by dice, and two on incantations (Dharani) against snake bites. The collection had at least four scribes, of whom three were likely Buddhists because the second, the sixth and the seventh treatises open by invoking the Buddha and other Buddhist deities. Two invoke Shiva, Vishnu, Devi, and other Hindu deities.A.F. Rudolf Hoernle (1891), Remarks on Birch Bark MS, Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 1891, Baptist Mission Press, Calcutta, pages 57–61;Bower Manuscript Translations: Parts III-VII, A.F. Rudolf Hoernle, pages 197, 209–210 The discovery of the manuscript in remote China near the Central Asian region is considered evidence of the spread and sharing of ideas in ancient times between India, China and Central Asia. It also contains excerpts of the Bhela Samhita, a medical text whose damaged manuscript is in Tanjavur, Tamil Nadu. The medical fragments of the Bower manuscript have much in common with other ancient Sanskrit medical treatises such as those by Caraka, Ravigupta, Vagbhata and Kashyapa.
The manuscript is named after Hamilton Bower – a British Lieutenant who bought the manuscript in March 1890 while on a mission to chase an assassin who was charged with hacking Andrew Dalgleish to death. The fragmentary manuscript was analyzed, edited, translated, and published by Calcutta-based Rudolf Hoernle. The Bower Manuscript is preserved in the collections of the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Discovery and edition
The Bower Manuscript is named after its accidental purchaser Hamilton Bower, a British Army Lieutenant. The story begins with the brutal murder of Andrew Dalgleish, a Scotsman camping in the Karakoram mountains, north of Kashmir. He was hacked to death inside his tent by an Afghan named Dad Mahomed. The British government wanted to bring Mahomed to justice, and therefore sent Hamilton Bower with some troops to go after the killer, states Wujastyk. Mahomed learned about the effort and escaped. Bower, in the chase, followed Mahomed through the Himalayan valleys into the Takla Makan desert. Bower arrived near Kucha (Xinjiang) in early March 1890 and set his camp. On the night of 2 or 3 March, a man came to his tent and offered to sell him old manuscripts and artifacts that his treasure hunters had found. Bower bought them.
Bower took the manuscripts with him when he returned to Simla and forwarded it to Colonel James Waterhouse, the then President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Waterhouse reported the manuscript at the monthly meeting of the Society on 5 November 1890, whose proceedings were widely distributed.J Waterhouse (1890), Birch Bark MS from Kashgaria, Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta, pages 221–223 At the meeting, he stated that Bower visited the site where the manuscript was found, and referred to the stupa as something that looked like a huge "cottage loaf" near the "Ming–oi" Buddhist monastery ruins, 16 miles from Kucha near the banks of a river. Waterhouse mentioned that the Bower manuscript had 56 leaves (the edition now preserved at Bodleian Library has 51 leaves). He reported that the Bower manuscript was bound with two wooden boards on either end and a string running through a hole. He had sought the help of Babu Sarat Chandra Das and Lama Phuntshog to decipher the manuscript. Neither was able to read the script and said it must be "very ancient", according to Waterhouse.
The Waterhouse report was reprinted in Bombay Gazette, where Hoernle learned about it and became very eager to study it.A.F. Rudolf Hoernle (1891), Remarks on Birch Bark MS, Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 1891, Baptist Mission Press, Calcutta, page 54 After the meeting, in parallel, some attempts were made to decipher the manuscript, but they proved unsuccessful. German Indologist Georg Buhler succeeded in reading and translating two leaves of the manuscript, reproduced in the form of heliogravures in the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.
Immediately after his return to India in February 1891, Hoernle began to study the manuscript. He found that the manuscript leaves were jumbled out of sequence, but had the page numbers marked on the left. After re-arranging them, he concluded that it was an abridged collection of several different treatises. He presented the first decipherment two months later, at the meeting of the Society in April 1891, with evidence that it was "the oldest Indian written book that is known to exist". Between 1893 and 1897 Hoernle published a complete edition of the text, featuring an annotated English translation and illustrated facsimile plates. A Sanskrit Index was published in 1908, and a revised translation of the medical portions (I, II, and III) in 1909; the Introduction appeared in 1912.
Description and dating The 'Bower Manuscript' is a collation of seven treatise manuscripts, compiled into a larger group and another a smaller one. The larger manuscript is a fragmentary convolute of six treatises (Part I, II, III, IV, V and VII), which are separately paginated, with each leaf approximately (). Part VI is written on smaller folio leaves, both in length and breadth, with each leaf approximately (). The larger group and the smaller set likely came from different trees or region. The scribes wrote on both sides of the leaves but did not use both sides when the leaf was very thin. These seven constituent manuscripts are numbered as Parts I to VII in Hoernle's edition.A.F. Rudolf Hoernle (1912), The Bower Manuscript, Facsimile leaves, Nagari transcript, Romanised transliteration and English translation with notes, Calcutta, Aditya Prakashan (Reprinted 2011), ; The Bower Manuscript, AF Rudolf Hoernle (1914), Volume XXII of the New Imperial series of the Archeological Survey of India, British India Press
The Bower manuscript, as discovered, had 56 birch bark leaves, cut into oblong palmyra shape (rectangular strips with rounded corners). This is the form commonly found in numerous ancient and medieval Indian manuscript books (pothī). The pages are bound in Indian style, with each leaf containing a hole about the middle of the left side, for the passage of the binding string. The undamaged leaves of the Bower manuscript are numbered on the left edge of the reverse side, a tradition found in ancient pothi manuscripts in north India, in contrast to the historic south Indian tradition of numbering the obverse side in manuscripts. This suggests that the Bower manuscript scribes were trained in the north Indian tradition.
The seven parts of the manuscript are written in an essentially identical script, the Gupta script (late Brahmi) found in north, northwest and western regions of ancient India. Early attempts to date the text placed it around 5th-century, largely on palaeographic grounds., Quote: "Kumaralata's Kalpanamanditika and the Udanavarga both of which are assignable on palaeographical grounds to the 4th or 5th century AD, and the Bower manuscripts the date of which is about a century later". Hoernle determined that the manuscript belonged to the 4th or 5th–century because the script used matched with dated inscriptions and other texts of that period in the north and northwest India.A.F. Rudolf Hoernle (1891), Remarks on Birch Bark MS, Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 1891, Baptist Mission Press, Calcutta, pages 54–65 He also compared the style and script for numerals – particularly zero and position value – and the page numbering style in the manuscript with those found in Indian inscriptions and manuscripts. By combining such evidence with palaeographic evidence therein, he concluded that the Bower manuscript could not be dated in or after the second half of the 6th century. Hoernle remarked that at least some treatises of the manuscript "must fall somewhere within that period [470 and 530 CE], that is, about 500 CE."A.F. Rudolf Hoernle (1891), Remarks on Birch Bark MS, Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 1891, Baptist Mission Press, Calcutta, pages 62–64
Winand M. Callewaert dates it to c. 450 CE. According to a 1986 analysis by Lore Sander, the Bower manuscript is best dated between 500 and 550 CE.
Scribes The fragmentary treatises are copies of much older Indian texts authored by unknown scholars. These treatises were prepared by scribes, buried in a stupa built at some point to honor the memory of a Buddhist monk or some other regional influential person. Hoernle distinguished four scribes, based on their handwriting, subtle font and style differences. One scribe wrote Parts I, II and III; second wrote Part IV; third wrote Parts V and VII; while a fourth wrote Part VI. He added that there may have been more than four scribes, because Part VI has some scribal differences, while V and VII too seems cursive and careless work of possibly more than one person.A.F. Rudolf Hoernle (1912), The Bower Manuscript, Facsimile leaves, Nagari transcript, Romanised transliteration and English translation with notes, Calcutta, Aditya Prakashan (Reprinted 2011), ; The Bower Manuscript, AF Rudolf Hoernle (1914), Volume XXII of the New Imperial series of the Archeological Survey of India, British India Press, Chapter 3
Based on the handwriting and fonts prevalent in the inscriptions discovered in India from that era, Hoernle suggested the first scribe who wrote Parts I through III likely grew up and came from Kashmir or Udyana (North India) to Kucha (China) because his writing shows early Sarada script influences. Part VI, and possibly V and VII were written by scribe(s) who may have come to China from a region that is now the central India to Andhra Pradesh, for similar reasons. The writer of part IV appears to have the style of someone used to "writing with a brush", and therefore may have been a local native or a Buddhist monk who came from interior China.
Contents The text consists of seven separate and different treatises, of which first three are on medicine, next two on divination, and last two on magical incantations. The three medicinal treatises contain content that is also found in the ancient Indian text called the Caraka Samhita. Treatises I to III are the medical treatises of the collection and contain 1,323 verses and some prose. The metrical writing suggests that the scribe of the three medical treatises was well versed in Sanskrit composition. The scribe of divination and incantation sections (Treatises IV-VII) was not conversant with classical Sanskrit, made grammatical errors and used a few Prakrit words.
The manuscript is mostly in the Shloka verse style – a Vedic anuṣṭubh poetic meter (exceptions are found in Part I of the collection). The Bower Manuscript is written in the Gupta script – a type of late Brahmi script.
Medical treatises