An Unusual Biography of the Buddha in Or.8210/S.3096: Śākyamuni and Yaśodharā Jointly Practicing the Way

Among the Dūnhuáng manuscripts dating from the late 9th and 10th centuries, materials such as ‘Transformation texts’ (biànwén 變文), ‘Sūtra lecture texts’ (jiǎngjīngwén 講經文), ‘Seat-settling texts’ (yāzuòwén 押座文), ‘Dūnhuáng avadāna’ (yīnyuán 因緣), etc. bear witness of the emergence of new genres, characterized by the use of a language featuring numerous colloquial expressions and vernacular syntactic constructions, and often committed to writing by using popular/demotic characters (súzì 俗字) or other forms of non-standard writing. Several of these genres have a prosimetric literary structure, alternating between passages in prose and rhyme, and some – such as the Transformation texts – were also directly related to images illustrating the narrative. The majority of these texts consists of Buddhist stories, adapted for the purpose of narration and/or performance for a general audience; this type of performance was an integral part of religious life during the late medieval period, and some events were even state-sponsored and lasted for extended periods of time. In this paper, I will focus on a text preserved in Or.8210/S.3096 of the British Library which includes a short and unusual biography of Śākyamuni, and in addition shows some remarkable features in its use of the language and variant characters. Only one leaf of the manuscript is preserved. The first part of the recto side consists of a Chán Buddhist inspired gāthā, followed by a prose narrative which continues on the verso side of the leaf.4 The paper is of inferior quality, but the handwriting was obviously performed by an experienced scribe who seems to have swiftly and informally written down the story, not aligning the Chinese characters and using numerous semi-cursive and cursive forms. The hand is different from the one who had copied the gāthā, and most probably the scribe reused the leaflet when noting down the short narrative on the life story of the Buddha, covering the remainder of the recto, and then continuing on the verso side.