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This paper argues that Tocharian B koṣko, koṣkīye does not mean ‘hut’, as was taken for granted, but ‘pit, hole’; and that it is not an inherited Indo-European word, but an Iranian loanword in Tocharian B. Although the possibility of a borrowing from an unknown Middle Iranian language cannot be excluded, an unattested (Pre-)Bactrian form *kōškā is demonstrated to be the most likely source of this loanword.

The present paper continues a serial article dealing with the identifications of sources for Chapter 6 of the Book of Zambasta, a Mahāyāna Buddhist poem in Khotanese. The first installment of this serial article was published in 2018 by the same authors in this journal. In this installment, we report on new identifications made in the interim, and offer a detailed analysis of four additional identified quotations, underlining their significance in historical and cross-cultural perspective.

Various interpretations of Kāśyapaparivarta § 68 have been attempted in the Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda tradition. This passage, which consists in a simile likening a magician devoured by his own creation to a monk involved in meditation practice, appears prima facie absurd, insofar as the similarity between the tenor and the vehicle is not readily apparent. This article mainly consists of two parts: The first part examines the received interpretations of the simile and reconstructs their interrelationship from a historical perspective. The second part explores the literary dimension of the simile and argues that its ostensible absurdity is rooted in a pun which is visible only in Middle Indo-Aryan and seems to serve no purpose. Coming to terms with the opaque and pointless pun, this essay is aimed at a new interpretation of Kāśyapaparivarta § 68 and, it is hoped, a deeper understanding of the literary playfulness inherent in the making of the Kāśyapaparivarta as a so-called early Mahāyāna sūtra against the backdrop of the Sanskritization of Buddhist sūtra literature.

In this article we propose a series of twenty-three new identifications of sources for chapter 6 of the Book of Zambasta, whose tradent claims to have quoted a verse “from each sūtra.” In this installment we offer a detailed analysis of the first five newly identified quotations, highlighting their place within Mahāyāna and Khotanese literature.

In 1958, a number of birchbark fragments in the Berlin collection of Turfan manuscripts were edited and published by Dieter Schlingloff under the title of Chandoviciti. He ascribed them to three independent texts on Sanskrit metrics, which contained numerous exemplary verses of a wide variety of Sanskrit meters. Therefore some scholars felt justified in assuming that the texts dated by Schlingloff in the second half of the fourth century ce were originally a collection of exemplary verses. Nevertheless the textual history of those texts remains obscure. This recent research is based on a scrutiny of the original source, while bringing about a correction of several readings. Furthermore, some palaeographical remarks might be able to suggest a somewhat later dating of the manuscripts in question than that proposed by Schlingloff. With regard to the title of this treatise, it follows from a historical perspective that Chandoviciti per se as a title would hardly be probable, if not impossible. In the last part of this article, light is shed on the internal diversity and inconsistency among those exemplary verses, which render it plausible that the so-called Turfan-Chandoviciti could have been a „mixed“ booklet compiled from at least four different sources which was then continuously abridged over the course of time from the very beginning of its spread along the Silk Road up to its final entry into Xinjiang.