“The Dead Sea Scrolls of Buddhism”

How do you underscore the historical significance of a recently recovered cache of ancient Buddhist manuscripts? You call them “the Dead Sea Scrolls of Buddhism.” That’s what Graham Shaw, deputy director of the British Library’s Oriental and India Office Collections, called a horde of documents purchased in 1997 by Martin Schøyen. How much are they worth? “It’s incalculable,” the London Times reports him as saying. “How would you put a value on the Dead Sea Scrolls?”

Many of the most important of these manuscripts are now available in Volume I of Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection (Oslo: Hermes Publishing, 2000) to which 11 leading Buddhist scholars contributed. Additional volumes are planned.