Some Problems Surrounding Sogdian Tantric Texts

26 June 2018 - Yukata Yoshida (Kyoto)
Some Problems Surrounding Sogdian Tantric Texts
invited lecture at the BuddhistRoad project, CERES, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Sogdians, an Iranian speaker, are famous as the merchants between West and East. In their homeland, Zoroastrism seems to have been dominant among them, but passing the trade routs, so-called Silk Road, they had contacts with different religions. When they came closer to China, some Sogdians became Buddhists. They also produced Buddhist texts in their own language and a small part of them came down to us by chance. In his lecture, Yutaka Yoshida, a leading scholar of Middle Iranian Studies, first gives an overview about Sogdian Buddhist texts which were excavated from Turfan and Dunhuang. Additionally he also focuses on Tantric texts and discusses them in detail.

Short report of the guest lecture.

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