page_title: Bower Manuscript
section_title: Discovery and edition
hierarchical_section_title: Bower Manuscript / Discovery and edition
caption_attribution_description: English: Title page of text edition
context_page_description: The Bower Manuscript is a collection of seven fragmentary Sanskrit treatises found buried in a Buddhist memorial stupa near Kucha, northwestern China. Written in early Gupta script on birch bark, it is variously dated in 5th to early 6th century. The Bower manuscript includes oldest dated fragments of an Indian medical text, the Navanitaka.
  The Bower manuscript includes fragments of three medical, two divination and two incantations treatises. The collection had at least four scribes, of which three were likely Buddhists because the second, the sixth and the seventh treatises open by invoking the Buddha and other Buddhist deities. Two invoke Shiva, Vishnu, Devi and other Hindu deities. The discovery of the manuscript in remote China near Central Asian region is considered evidence of the spread and sharing of ideas in ancient times between India, China and Central Asia. It also contains excerpts of the Bheda Samhita text on medicine, a text whose damaged manuscript is in Tanjavur, Tamil Nadu. The medical fragments of the Bower manuscript have much in common with other ancient Sanskrit medical treatises such as those by Caraka, Sushruta, Ravigupta, Vagbhata and Kashyapa.
context_section_description: The Bower Manuscript is named after its accidental purchaser Hamilton Bower, a British Army Lieutenant. The story begins with the brutal murder of Andrew Dalgliesh, a Scotsman camping in the Karakoram mountains, north of Kashmir. He was hacked to death inside his tent by an Afghan named Dad Mahomed. The British government wanted to bring Mahomed to justice, and therefore sent Hamilton Bower with some troops to go after the killer, states Wujastyk. Mahomed learned about the effort and escaped. Bower, in the chase, followed Mahomed through the Himalayan valleys into the Takla Makan desert. Bower arrived near Kucha (Xinjiang) in early March 1890 and set his camp. On the night of 2nd or 3rd March, a man came to his tent and offered to sell him old manuscripts and artifacts that his treasure hunters had found. Bower bought them. 
  Bower took the manuscripts with him when he returned to Simla and forwarded it to Colonel James Waterhouse, the then President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Waterhouse reported the manuscript at the monthly meeting of the Society on November 5, 1890, whose proceedings were widely distributed. At the meeting, he stated that Bower visited the site where the manuscript was found, and referred to the stupa as something that looked like a huge "cottage loaf" near the "Ming–oi" Buddhist monastery ruins, 16 miles from Kucha near the banks of a river. Waterhouse mentioned that the Bower manuscript had 56 leaves (the edition now preserved at Bodleian Library has 51 leaves). He reported that the Bower manuscript was bound with two wooden boards on either end and a string running through a hole. He had sought the help of Babu Sarat Chandra Das and Lama Phuntshog to decipher the manuscript. Neither was able to read the script and said it must be "very ancient", according to Waterhouse.
  The Waterhouse report was reprinted in Bombay Gazette, where Hoernle learned about it and became very eager to study it. After the meeting, in parallel, some attempts were made to decipher the manuscript, but they proved unsuccessful. German Indologist Georg Buhler succeeded in reading and translating two leaves of the manuscript, reproduced in the form of heliogravures in the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.
  Immediately after his return to India in February 1891, Hoernle began to study the manuscript. He found that the manuscript leaves were jumbled out of sequence, but had the page numbers marked on the left. After re-arranging them, he concluded that it was an abridged collection of several different treatises. He presented the first decipherment two months later, at the meeting of the Society in April 1891, with evidence that it was "the oldest Indian written book that is known to exist". Between 1893 and 1897 Hoernle published a  complete edition of the text, featuring an annotated English translation and illustrated facsimile plates. A Sanskrit Index was published in 1908, and a revised translation of the medical portions (I, II, and III) in 1909; the Introduction appeared in 1912.
caption: Hoernle's 1897 text and translation of manuscript's Parts III to VII
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