FOREWORD
The present publication of the Lotus Sutra in Sanskrit is without exaggeration an
outcome of over a hundred years of dedicated work and efforts of generations ofcollectors, researchers, curators, and restorers. The manuscript of the Lotus Sutra
introduced to readers of this publication has been stored at the Institute of Oriental
Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IOM RAS). The manuscript isrecognized as one of the “diamonds” of the world’s largest and most valuable Russiancollection of Eastern books and manuscripts. The collection of the manuscripts stored atIOM RAS includes over 115,000 items in 65 living and extinct Oriental languages.
IOM RAS was founded as the Asiatic Museum. On November 23 (11), 1818, thepresident of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg at the time, Sergei
Semenovich Uvarov (1786-1855), approached the Board of the Academy with a letter inwhich he emphasized the “necessity of opening a specialized section for Eastern medals,manuscripts, and books” within the Kunstkamera of the Academy.1 The request
matched the overall goals of scientific research at the time, which was primarily focusedon the research of antiquities and monuments of the past.
Christian Martin Frähn (1782-1851), an outstanding numismatist and historian in
the field of Oriental studies, became the first director of the Asiatic Museum. Accordingto I. Y. Krachkovskij (1883-1951) and V. V. Barthold (1869-1930), both Russian
Oriental scholars and historians, due to Frähn’s tremendous efforts, the Asiatic Museum
reached a level of development that other European centers of Oriental studies needed atleast 200 years to achieve in the relatively short period of just two decades. One of thejustifications for establishing the Asiatic Museum was the purchase of over 700 unique
Muslim manuscripts of Arabic graphics made in 1819 and 1825 from
Jean-Baptiste-Louis-Jacques Rousseau (1780-1831), the French consul in Aleppo andrelative of the great philosopher. The research work on the new collection immediatelyenhanced the development of the Arabist studies in St. Petersburg. From that point on,
all of the Asiatic Museum’s significant purchases had a direct influence on the growthof specialized fields of Oriental studies in Russia. The purchases from the collection ofP. L. Schilling von Canstadt (1786-1837) made in 1836 and 1838 by the AsiaticMuseum contributed to the expansion of Tibetan, Mongolian and Buddhist studies. The
collecting activities of M. I. Brosse (1802-1880) in the middle of the 19th century
caused significant breakthroughs in certain research fields such as Georgian andArmenian studies, which then led to the establishment of one of the most recognizedcenters of Caucasus studies and the Georgian fund.

The Asiatic Museum was considered by the Russian government and the Academyof Sciences to be a major center responsible for coordinating all the sources needed forresearch and study of Oriental cultures and customs. Already in the middle of the 19thcentury, the Museum was the only governmental institution for the storage and researchof Oriental manuscripts that guaranteed their safety and coordinated their usage forpractical and scientific purposes. The manuscripts were accesible not only to researchersand practitioners of Oriental studies in St. Petersburg, but also, according to theregulations at the time, could be delivered for research purposes to the Russian
provinces and even abroad. The Asiatic Museum from its very first day of existenceserved not only a research and storage function, but also as an educational institution bymaking its collections available to the public. Access without any special arrangement
was provided to anyone interested in the rare exhibits of the Museum, and Oriental
scholars could use the manuscripts for research purposes.
One of the remarkable stages in the enlargement of the Museum collection was
definitely related to the expeditions to Central Asia at the turn of the century around1900. The materials collected during those expeditions contributed to the emergence of
unique research fields such as Dunhuangology, Uyghurology, Tangutology, and Turkic
runic epigraphy. The Russian Geographical Society, founded in 1845, became theorganizer of the first multidimentional expeditions to the Ussuri region, Mongolia, andChina. The explorers N. M. Przhevalsky (1839-1888), M. V. Pevtsov (1843-1902), G. N.
Potanin (1835-1920), and V. I. Roborovsky (1856-1910), who took part in theexpeditions focused on the discoveries of antiques, initiated archaeological excavations,and purchased ancient manuscripts and other items of everyday life from locals.
Russian diplomats contributed greatly to the foundation of Oriental manuscript
funds in their country. In 1844, the Russian government imposed a purchasing duty on
the consuls in Asia for manuscripts written in Oriental languages. The government’s
order was strictly maintained until 1914, the beginning of the First World War. In 1863,
an extensive collection was presented to the Asiatic Museum by the Asian Departmentof the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A significant number of handwritten items and books
in various languages was donated to the Museum at the end of the 19th and beginningof the 20th centuries by Russian diplomats who served in the Far East and Central Asia.
Nikolay Fedorovich Petrovsky (1837-1908), diplomat and Orientalist, played aformidable role in the reaserch of the antiquities of Central and Middle Asia. At thebeginning of his career he had joined the army, and between years 1859 to 1861, after
graduating from the Cadets Corps in Moscow, he served as an instructor in a similar
institution known as the Alexander Cadets Corps for orphans. In 1870, N. F. Petrovsky

was assigned as a representative of the Ministry of Finance in the General Governorshipof Turkistan and was transferred to Tashkent in order to collect information regarding
the general situation of trade and industry.
Already in Tashkent, N. F. Petrovsky began to research the history of the region
and was actively engaged in local academic life. He participated in the opening of boththe Turkestan Branch of the Natural Science, Anthropology, and Ethnography Lovers
Society, a Central Asian scientific association, and the Turkistan Club of Archaeology
Lovers. In 1872, he set off for Bukhara, India, and Afganistan. Between October andDecember 1878, he visited Tiflis, Batum, Poti, and Kars in order to gather informationon the Russian trade situation in the Transcaucasian region, Persia, and the territoriesreconquered from Turkey.2 Petrovsky was promoted to the position of the consul in
Kashgar on June 1, 1882. In August 1903, he accomplished his service and settled in
Tashkent where he died on November 19, 1908.
N. F. Petrovsky not only supported the extension of Russian involvement inEastern Turkestan but also advanced the field of scientific archaeological research.
According to his biographers, Petrovsky “was considered a first-class expert on Eastern
Turkestan. The extensive knowledge he gained from his outstanding library of French,
German, English, and Turkish languages helped him to broaden access to the studies
through various languages published about the region in general and the Central Asianregion in particular.”3The long-term cooperation between Petrovsky and the Oriental Branch of theImperial Russian Archaeological Society (EBRAS) started with his attendance at a
meeting organized by the society on March 15, 1890, where he demonstrated a few
coins he had brought from Central Asia.4 On November 28, 1891, in response to asuggestion made by Sergey Fedorovich Oldenburg (1863-1934), EBRAS approachedPetrovsky with a request to provide information on the existence of archaeological sites
in Kucha and other areas of Kashgaria. Petrovsky sent a detailed reply together with amanuscript he had purchased two years earlier. The manuscript was the famous“Kashgar Manuscript” featured in the current publication. It was introduced to thescientific society by S. F. Oldenburg in 1892.5
Also known as the Kashgar Manuscript, it was the first manuscript that started theSerindian (Central Asian) fund of the Asiatic Museum that at present maintains over
7,000 items in Uyghur, Tocharian, Saka, Sogdian, and other unique languages, andremains one of the most valuable collections worldwide. Between the years 1892 and1893, Petrovsky forwarded to S. F. Oldenburg over 100 folios and fragments ofmanuscripts that he purchased from the inhabitants of Kucha, Korla, and Aksu. In 1905

he donated the entire Eastern Turkestan collection of the manuscripts to the RussianCommittee for Middle and East Asia Exploration that was founded in 1903. Later, theother Russian consuls in Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang), N. N. Krotkov, A. A. Dyakov,and S. A. Kolokolov, followed Petrovsky and started to send the manuscripts theypurchased to the Committee on a regular basis. The research activities conducted by
Russian scholars in Central Asia matched the general tendencies of the mainstream
school of Oriental studies worldwide as the region appeared to be at the top of research
agendas at the time and received most of the attention toward the end of the 19th andbeginning of the 20th centuries. As a result, a few extinct and forgotten languages(Khotanese-Saka and Tocharian A and B) were discovered, and certain new research
trends were developed in the field of Oriental studies due to the findings of not only
Russian, but also German, British, and Japanese diplomats, explorers, and researchers.
The objectives of the Museum that received a large portion of the manuscripts
imported to Russia included taking inventory, cataloguing, researching them, andutilizing them for other scientific purposes. Part of the exclusive texts from Central Asia
were published already at the beginning of the first decade of the 20th century due to thecombined efforts of V. V. Radloff (1837-1918), K. G. Salemann (1849-1916), S. F.
Oldenburg, F. A. Rosenberg (1867-1934), A. I. Ivanov (1878-1937), S. E. Malov(1880-1957), and N. A. Nevsky (1892-1937), among others.
The Museum was reorganized in 1930 and started functioning as the Institute ofOriental Studies (IOS) of the USSR Academy of Sciences. From that point, along withresearch of the written heritage of the East, the staff members of the new Institute wereexpected to conduct the research on current issues of Asian history, and to compile new
dictionaries and grammar guides of Oriental languages in general, and the languages ofthe Soviet Asian republics as a priority. In 1950, the Council of Ministers of the Soviet
Union and the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences decided to transfer the Institute toMoscow. The Department of Oriental Manuscripts remained in Leningrad. In 1956, it
was reorganized into the Leningrad Branch of IOS, and in 1991, into the St. Petersburg
Branch of the IOS of RAS. In 2007, the St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute ofOriental Studies was reorganized again into the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts ofRAS.
In the 1950s, Vladimir Svyatoslavovich Vorobyov-Desyatovsky (1927-1956)
continued the inventory and the research work on the Serindian fund by compiling apreliminary catalog of the palaeographical description of all the fragments. He initiatedthe process of describing (based on the collection in St. Petersburg) the various issues inCentral Asian philology comprehensively. Unfortunately, he managed to complete only

a few of his projects before his untimely death.6
Thereafter, M. I. Vorobyova-Desyatovskaya continued the work on fragments in
Indian languges from the collection of the IOS RAS. In the first place, in the years 1990
and 2004, due to her tenacious efforts and contributions of G. M. Bongard-Levin(1931-2009) and E. N. Tyomkin, the pages of the Petrovky’s Kashgar Manuscript fromthe St. Petersburg’s collection came out in the 2nd and 3rd volumes of the publication“The Monuments of Indian Scripts from Central Asia” («Памятники индийскойписьменности из Центральной Азии») as a facsimile, transliterated with scientificexplanations.7
The current publication, put together by leading experts in the field of Central
Asian textology for the first time, offers the reader a color facsimile of the Lotus Sutra
text in Sanskrit found in Xinjiang at the end of the 19th century. The manuscript fromthe collection of our Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of RAS was supplemented byfragments from other world collections. With these portions added, this current
publication can truly be called the most complete and invaluable research source on thehistory of Buddhism in the vast regions of Central Asia and the Far East.
I. F. Popova
Director of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts RAS
Notes
1. St. Petersburg Branch Archive RAS. F. 4. Inv. 2 (1818), unit 52. F. 12-13.
2. Bukhert, V. G. ....And his Russian Portrait // N. F. Petrovsky. Letters fromTurkestan. Ed. by V. S. Myasnikov. M: The Monuments of Historical Thought, 2010, p.
23.
3. Nikolay Fedorovich Petrovsky // Historiography of Social Science in Uzbekistan.
Biobibliographical Essays. Ed. by B. V. Lunin. Tashkent: Fan Publishers, Uzbek SSR,
1974, p. 278.
4. The Notes of the Oriental Branch of the Imperial Russian ArchaeologicalSociety. StP, 1891. Vol. V. Pt. I. P. II-III; Bukhert, V. G. ....And his Russian Portrait. P.
31.
5. Oldenburg, S. F. N. F. Petrovsky’s Kashgar Manuscript // Proceedings of theOriental Branch of the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society. V. VII (1892). 1893. P.
81-82.
6. The Monuments of Indian Scripts from Central Asia. Vol. 1. Pub. of the texts,
study, and com. by G. M. Bongard-Levin and M. I. Vorobyova-Desyatovskaya. M:

Oriental Literature, 1985. P. 11. (The Monuments of Oriental Scripts, LXXIII,1;
Bibliotheca Buddhica, XXXIII).
7. The Monuments of Indian Scripts from Central Asia. Vol. 2. Pub. of the texts,
study, trans., and com. by G. M. Bongard-Levin and M. I. Vorobyova-Desyatovskaya.
M: Oriental Literature, 1990. (The Monuments of Oriental Scripts, LXXIII, 1;
Bibliotheca Buddhica, XXXIV); The Monuments of Indian Scripts from Central Asia.
Vol. 3. Pub. of the texts, study, trans., and com. by G. M. Bongard-Levin and M. I.
Vorobyova-Desyatovskaya. M: Oriental Literature, 2004. (The Monuments of Oriental
Scripts, LXXIII, 3; Bibliotheca Buddhica, XL).