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This chapter focuses on a language whose very name was first proposed by the great scholar whose career is celebrated in this volume. For it was Harold Bailey's 1946 article whose title ‘Gāndhārī’ introduced that name for the first time. The discussion covers the varieties of literary Gāndhārī, the historical development of Gāndhārī as a literary language, the character of literary Gāndhārī, and Gāndhārī and the modern language of the northwest.

This chapter analyses the problems associated with Buddhist Sanskrit vocabulary. The obvious reason for these problems is the well-known linguistic diversity that prevailed in the vast area of India in ancient times as it does today. The first to experience them were most likely the early Buddhist monks, when they propagated their faith and tried to make themselves understood beyond Magadha, the original home of Buddhism, and then in the course of time even beyond India. These problems were gradually exported from India, as Buddhists in Central Asia and finally in China started to struggle with strange Sanskrit — or even worse Gāndhārī — words in their attempt to translate new and alien concepts into Chinese and other languages.

This chapter examines recent discoveries of early Buddhist manuscripts and discusses their implications for the history of Buddhist texts and canons. All of the manuscripts in question were written in the one or another of the varieties of the Gāndhārī language, that is, the Middle Indo-Aryan vernacular of the northwestern portion of the Indian subcontinent, and in the Kharosthī script, an Indian adaptation of Achaemenian Aramaic which, unlike all other Indic scripts, was written from right to left. Although the circumstances and location of their discoveries are not well documented, it is fairly certain that most of them come from Buddhist sites in eastern Afghanistan. Until recent discoveries were made, only one manuscript in Gāndhārī had been available to scholars, the birch-bark scroll containing a Gāndhārī version of the Dharmapada. For many years, it had been uncertain whether this manuscript was a unique or rare anomaly, or whether it was rather the sole survivor of a larger literature.

This chapter explores the topics of strīdharma or womens's dharma and marriage law as the Mahābhārata portrays them through the three generations of dynastic instability that precede the generation of the epic's main heroes. This skein shows how the women marrying into the central dynastic line, beginning with the river goddess Gaṅgā, make women's dharma central to intersecting dimensions of time in which dharmic norms come under repeated scrutiny. Gaṅgā, who takes an interest in the Bhārata dynasty's “history” (itihāsa) as part of a divine plan, leaves her husband; he then marries Satyavatī, who brings her prermarital son Vyāsa, the Mahābhārata's “author”—and thus something like authorial time—into the line's genealogy. The next generation is then traced through the stories of how Gaṅgā's son Bhīṣma, ineligible to rule and sworn to celibacy, abducts the three sisters Ambā, Ambikā, and Ambālikā to marry them to Satyavatī's one remaining son, and how, once Ambikā and Ambālikā become widows, Vyāsa sires sons with them. The role of the chief queen (mahiṣī) in the Vedic horse sacrifice (Aśvamedha) is drawn into interpreting Vyāsa's unions with Ambikā and Ambālikā. In the third generation, Vyāsa's two flawed sons then marry: Pāṇḍu with Kuntī and Mādrī; Dhṛtarāṣṭra with Gāndhārī; and these three ingenious women then become mothers of the Pāṇḍavas and Kauravas.

In this chapter, Ingo Strauch provides a translation of Fragment 01 from the Bajaur Collection of Kharoṣṭhī fragments. Fragment 01 is the Gāndhārī version of sūtra known in the Pāli as the Dakkiṇāvibhaṅgasutta (MN 142), which also occurs in the Chinese Madhyama-āgama with a title that corresponds to a Sanskrit title of Gautamīsūtra. Strauch assesses the manuscript fragment in relation to both direct and indirect parallels. He provides detailed editions and translations of sections of the manuscript set alongside other versions of the sūtra. Also included is some discussion of the key features of the Gāndhārī version that set it apart from other versions. Most notable is the inclusion of nuns on a list of worthy recipients of gifts, a difference pertinent to the role of the nuns' community with early Buddhist traditions.