Oldest Buddhist Manuscripts Discovered in Ladakh
The Matho Fragments, which have been recently made available online by the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC), are a highly uncommon assortment of ancient manuscripts.
In fact, they are the oldest manuscripts ever found in Ladakh. These manuscripts, originating from Matho, consist of the incomplete remnants of over 433 texts, with only a few of them extending beyond a few damaged pages.
For nearly 800 years, these manuscripts were preserved within a Buddhist stupa untouched until their discovery a decade ago.
In 2014, Professor Helmut Tauscher and Bruno Lainé from the Tibetan Manuscript Project Vienna (TMPV) were informed about the Matho manuscript fragments by locals and acquaintances, including Nelly Rieuf, who later became the director of the Matho Museum.
The fragments were successfully photographed in 2015, and it wasn’t until winter 2023 that they were made available to the public through publication on BDRC, thanks to the generosity of Professor Tauscher.
The publication was made possible by a new software development called SCAM, created by BDRC in the previous year.
SCAM is an AI-powered tool that can crop photos of texts with irregular shapes and edges, which was necessary for the Matho Fragments.
Dr. Lainé utilized SCAM to process all the pages in the collection automatically within weeks, a task that would have taken him months to complete manually.
References
- The Oldest Buddhist Manuscripts Discovered in Ladakh: The Incredible Story of the Matho Fragments
- Tibetan Manuscript Project Vienna
