Ricerc@Sapienza

The Khotanese word Zambasta 17.14 ba??ä means ‘monsoon rains’, not ‘torrents’, and is a loanword from Gandhari going ultimately back to Sanskrit var?a? ‘rain(y season); year’. Recognition that the Khotanese word occurring in Suvar?a­bh?sottamas?tra 10.40 and so far read bihare in manuscript Or. 59 and ]?hare in manuscript Q should actually be read biha?e ‘dwells’, a loanword ultimately from Sanskrit viharati allows a more accurate translation of the passage.

T III S 16 is a complete folio that contains vv. 9-16 of chap. 13 of The book of Zambasta (= Z), an Old Khotanese poem on Mahayana Buddhism commonly believed to have been composed not earlier than the seventh century. The very existence of T III S 16 shows that this is not the case, since this folio should be dated to the fifth or early sixth century on account of the Early Turkestan Brahmi type b used in it. Thus, Z is contemporary with, or even precedes, the oldest known Khotanese translations of Buddhist s?tras.

Late Khotanese has the verbs ¹bijs‑ ‘to pour’ < Iranian *u̯ai̯ǰ‑ ‘to shake, swing’ and ²bījs‑ ‘to fit in’ (intransitive) < Iranian *u̯i̯ač‑ ‘to contain’. The article reinterprets three passages in two Buddhist works and shows that the second verb also occurs in Old Khotanese and was originally spelled ²bijs‑.

All Khotanese verbs in -Vṣ- with attested third singular present indicative have been
regarded so far as type B verbs, that is, synchronically, verbs with no intervening
vowel between the present stem and the third singular endings -itä active < Iranian
*-a-ti and -te middle < Iranian *-a-tai̯ (variously assimilated to the stem finals,
e.g. -ʾtä, -ṣ-ḍe). Besides, all of them have been considered to be middle verbs with
third singular present indicative -ṣḍe apart from the active verbs *käṣ- ‘to think; to

Re-edition, translation and commentary of the Late Khotanese document on wood: Or. 8211/1475 of the British Library.

Verse 2.139 of the long studied fifth-century Old Khotanese Buddhist poem known as the Book of Zambasta contains three hapax legomena. Two of them have been misinterpreted so far. Identification of the verse as a saying of wisdom with close parallels in other Buddhist works in Pāli and Sanskrit, as well as in Hindu and Jaina literature, allows its better interpretation and recognition of jūṣḍānā‑ as the Khotanese word for ‘(grain) musk’.

The Berlin Khotanese fragment ‘bi 43’ seems to belong to an unidentified Buddhist text with
spells against various evils. It contains the first attestation of the verb durṣḍä ‘it bites’,
which makes it possible to bring together and assign to a verb *druv’- , pp. durṣṭa- ‘to bite,
sting’ several Khotanese words that occurr in contexts of snakes and other biting or stinging
animals and have been variously interpreted and explained so far: Late Khotanese drvīdä
‘they bite’, dū̆ (r)ṣṭa- ‘bitten, stung’, Old Khotanese druvā ‘biting’, and drutāta ‘id.’.