Piecing Together Dunhuang Fragments - A case study of the "Diamond Sūtra" Manuscripts

A case study of the "Diamond Sūtra" Manuscripts by Luo Mujun Luo Mujun, professor at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, School of Humanities, was welcomed by the EFEO from August 28th 2023 to August 27th 2024 thanks to funding from the Chinese Scholar Council (CSC). She has carried out research on Dunhuang Studies, at the EFEO, in cooperation with Costantino Moretti. Her main fields of interest are Dunhuang Buddhist manuscripts, Codicology, Chinese Buddhist apocryphal scriptures, Buddhist studies, and Chinese philology. The "Diamond Sūtra" is an important Mahāyāna scripture, which has been translated six times into Chinese. The translations by Kumārajīva and Xuanzang are the most popular. There are 3718 Chinese fragments of the "Diamond Sūtra" among Dunhuang documents collected around the world, and 101 of them are kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). The BnF collection has more complete and precious manuscripts compared to the other collections, such as manuscripts P.2876, P.4503, P.3278, etc. A consistent number of Chinese Dunhuang documents (3650) are fragmentary. In recent years, scholars have carried out in-depth research in order to piece together scattered fragments of manuscripts kept in the various collections. Thanks to this significant work many fragmentary documents are now more complete. This research has also allowed scholars to update information found in previous catalogues of Dunhuang manuscripts, and to formulate new hypotheses concerning the origin and nature of documents found in the so-called “cave library”.