Jataka and Avadana texts in West and East Tocharian: An interdisciplinary analysis of the Central Asian transmission

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The project intends to provide a comprehensive edition of the most important Jataka und Avadana fragments in Tocharian with Tocharian text, apparatus criticus, a new German translation, a philological-comparative, buddhological and linguistic commentary. The comparison of the Tocharian Jataka and Avadana fragments with Central Asian parallel texts will provide a key to their philological and linguistic analysis of the Tocharian fragments. The systematic analysis of the formal traits of the Tocharian Jataka and Avadana texts in comparison with Indian parallels will shed an important light on the development of the Buddhist narrative literature along the northern Silk Road.Since the knowledge of the grammar and lexicon of both Tocharian languages is still far from being complete, the investigation of the Tocharian Jatakas and Avadanas requires an intimate collaboration of various disciplines, of Indo-European linguistics, Indology, Central Asian studies, and Buddhist studies, whose skills have to be involved in the project in an exemplary fashion.