A Tale of Two Texts–––A New Philological Investigation of Dunhuang Manuscript P.2526

Abstract:In 1911 a Dunhuang manuscript fragment, later known as P.2526, was made available to Chinese scholars via microfilm. Since then, generations of scholars have made forays into the study of the hypothetical original text of P.2526 and the context of its composition. This endeavor, however, seems to be a lost cause. As Albert Dien points out, when one identification is rejected, without any direct evidence, it would be equally problematic to assign another title to the fragment. In this paper, I study P.2526 as a Tang artifact in the form in which it has come down to us, without trying to recover an earlier form of the text. This New Philology-inspired perspective shifts the focus from the unknown and often hypothesized ancestral text of the manuscript to something concrete and approachable—the manuscript itself. Paleographical, codicological, and text-critical examinations of the manuscript uncover the life cycle of this one manuscript as a tale of two texts, each representing a distinct intellectual and socio-textual tradition, preserved in this single physical form for over a thousand years. P.2526 recto documents a portion of a leishu compilation, of value to the cultural elite of the center of the Tang empire in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. It is preserved only owing to the common practice in the Dunhuang area of reusing paper fragments due to the scarcity of paper since the second half of the eight century. P.2526 verso, entirely ignored in the previous studies of the manuscript, is a Buddhist liturgical text, produced and used locally in Dunhuang at the periphery of the Tang empire. It is the materiality of the manuscript P.2526, as a physical object, that ties together these two distinct and unrelated texts and presents itself as one tale.