Search Results (5)

This paper provides a concise overview of the current state of research on Khotanese painting. Early documentation from the first archaeological expeditions in the early twentieth century, together with Joanna Williams’ seminal study of 1973, laid the foundations for the discipline. In recent decades, however, both renewed scholarly attention and archaeological investigations conducted in China have substantially expanded our knowledge of Khotanese pictorial traditions. These studies have refined our understanding of iconography, stylistic development, and thematic repertoire, while also offering new perspectives on the sources and dissemination of local artistic forms. This contribution will also consider the persistent uncertainties surrounding the chronological framework—a common challenge in the study of the region’s artistic production, particularly evident in the case of Khotan. Such problems arise from the uneven and often unsystematic nature of the documentation produced since the late nineteenth century, compounded by the fragmentary state of preservation of the material and its dispersal across multiple museum collections worldwide. These circumstances continue to pose significant challenges to the reconstruction and interpretation of Khotanese painting within its broader historical and cultural context. Full article

This paper examines the Khotanese tradition in the political and cultural history of the Tarim Basin in the first millennium CE by foregrounding its role as an active facilitator within a multicultural and continually transforming geopolitical environment. The paper approaches Khotanese as both a medium through which local forms of social organization were articulated and a mediator embedded in wider circuits of exchange linking the Tarim Basin with South, Central, and East Asia. Particular attention is given to the linguistic and textual evidence for interaction with other traditions in and around the Tarim Basin, and to cases in which adaptation, (re-)composition, and translation can be associated with identifiable historical settings, institutions, and actors. The paper argues from selected examples that the history of Khotanese illuminates how regional languages sustained local authority while remaining deeply entangled with transregional formations of knowledge, culture, and exchange, and how, in the contested spaces of imperial borderlands, local communities had to hone cultural prestige in and through their languages in order to maintain their standing. Full article

Several dozen Chinese scrolls from Dunhuang contain Khotanese writings on the verso. The contents of the Khotanese side are relatively diverse, including drafts letters and reports addressed to the Khotanese court, accounts and contracts, writing exercises, narrative works such as the Rāmāyaṇa and Sudhanāvadāna, lyrical poetry, medical treatises and Buddhist texts. By contrast, the Chinese side is significantly more uniform in content and appearance, comprising popular Mahāyāna scriptures copied in an even script, adhering to a regular layout. Although the Chinese sūtras were for the most part copied during the Sui-Tang era or the subsequent period of Tibetan rule over Dunhuang, the Khotanese writings seem to have been added significantly later, during the long tenth century. The reuse of Chinese Buddhist scrolls to write unrelated content—in Chinese and other languages—has typically been explained as the practice of recycling discarded manuscripts. Such explanations essentially see the Chinese sūtras on the recto as waste that was no longer wanted. This paper argues that the repurposing of Chinese scrolls could not have been exclusively motivated by paper shortage and the desire to cut costs. The paper situates this phenomenon within a broader range of reuse practices attested in Buddhist communities across Asia. The central argument advanced here is that reuse often involved a deliberate engagement with earlier textual layers, which retained aspects of their meaning even as new texts were added to the manuscript. Full article

Among the painted wooden tablets found at Dandan Oilik (Khotan), possibly dated to the seventh–eighth century, A. Stein and other scholars pointed to the presence of non-Indian deities that could be rooted in the pre-Buddhist Khotanese religious milieu. Since the language spoken in ancient Khotan belonged to the Eastern Iranian branch of the so-called Indo-European languages, it seemed obvious to some experts to imagine that the local deities depicted on those wooden tablets had an Iranian background. Newly excavated mural paintings from small Buddhist temples in the region of Khotan allowed us to better consider some of these local deities, who presented unique elements and symbolic animals possibly related to other eastern Iranian forms of so-called Zoroastrianism, such as the religion of pre-Islamic Sogdiana and Chorasmia. Full article

This article examines Khotan’s role in the transmission and reception of Avataṃsaka/Huayan Buddhism, arguing that the Buddhāvataṃsaka-sūtra’s exceptional prestige and royal protection in Khotan provided favourable conditions for the circulation—and possibly the redaction—of large Mahāyāna compilations. It then analyses two Avataṃsaka-group meditation texts translated by the Khotanese monk Devendraprajñā (The Section on the Cultivation of Loving-Kindness and The Section on the Inconceivable Buddha-Realm), showing how they combine Huayan cosmology and non-obstruction with visualization-based contemplative techniques. Finally, by reading these texts alongside The Mahāyāna Sūtra on the Merits of Creating Images Spoken by the Buddha, the article highlights a functional differentiation within Khotanese practice: the meditation texts prioritise cognitive and visionary transformation and largely omit formal repentance, whereas the image-making sūtra explicitly requires repentance as a precondition for karmic purification, promising the elimination or mitigation of karmic consequences through the making of Buddha images. Full article