PROJECTS OF THE IUA

As a result of a series of expeditions undertaken by French, English, German, Japanese and Russian researchers, extensive manuscript remains from the city ruins and cave monasteries of extinct cultures of Central Asia have been discovered. Large portions of the canon of the sacred writings of the Buddhists in Sanskrit and ancient commentaries on them, which were previously believed lost, have been found in these manuscripts. The texts were fragmentary in most cases, and thus they have had to be restored and edited with the help of parallel texts in the Pali, Tibetan and Chinese versions of the Buddhist canonical literature. After the largest part of the relevant Sanskrit texts had been edited, Ernst Waldschmidt (1897-1985) submitted the plan for a dictionary of these texts to the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen in 1953.
The dictionary aims at the further exploration of the Sanskrit Buddhist texts from the Turfan finds and of the canonical literature of the Sarvāstivāda school. At the same time an important contribution to Indian lexicography is made.

The first instalment was published in 1972 under the editorship of Georg von Simson (now University of Oslo). In 1982, Michael Schmidt was appointed editor of the dictionary. The first volume of eight instalments comprising the entries beginning with the vowels (a-au) was completed in 1993 and published in 1994. It is planned to publish the dictionary complete in four volumes. Relevant textual material is being published in a series of 'Beihefte' of the dictionary.

The project was adopted as a Category C project by the IUA in 1994, on the initiative of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen.

Directed by the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen.

Director : H. Bechert 1970-2003, K. Röhrborn 2004-

Web site : http://swtf.adw-goettingen.gwdg.de/