In history, an oasis called Turfan existed, fed by underground water from the Tianshan Mountains, in what’s today eastern Xinjiang. This fertile oasis was actually a geographical depression that naturally formed an amazing reservoir of water in an otherwise arid desert landscape. Because of its water and fertile soil, it became one of the most important northern nodes on the ancient Silk Road.
Just as the Southern node of the Silk Road loops through Kashmir, Khotan, Kucha, and Dunhuang, as discussed in my last column, we are discovering Sanskrit corridors on the northern branch, marked by the settlements of Khocho (Gaochang), Yarkhoto (Jiaohe), Murtuk, Sengim, and Toyok, in this article. Each of these sites is located within the wider oasis, about 8 to 15 kilometers from each other.
Many of these sites are today marked by spectacular archaeological ruins – the Yarkhoto ruins date back as far as 2,300 years; Khocho is roughly 2,000 years old; and Toyok (Tuyugou Grottoes) dates to the 5th century AD.
Most of these historical and cultural ruins remained hidden for millennia and were first discovered during the expeditions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, primarily by Germans, Russians, and the Japanese. These expeditions uncovered many Sanskrit and other-language manuscripts, revealing a rich Sanskrit literary, linguistic, and phonetic heritage, as well as a multilingual translation culture in which Buddhist texts were translated among Sanskrit, Chinese, Tocharian, Sogdian, and Old Turkic.
German expeditions unearthed Turfan’s Sanskrit scholarship
Four German expeditions, led by Albert Grünwedel and Albert von Le Coq, excavated Buddhist sites across the Turfan Oasis and the northern Tarim Basin between 1902 and 1914. Grünwedel and Le Coq were German orientalists inspired by the archaeological work of the Russian scholar Wilhelm Radloff and Carl Salemann in Xinjiang.
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According to the Berlin State Library, which holds the archaeological material and manuscripts gathered by the German expeditions in Central Asia, Grünwedel and Le Coq discovered manuscripts and block prints in 15 languages and about 30 scripts at the archaeological ruins, indicating the linguistic diversity of this northern portion of the ancient Silk Road.
The Turfan German collection is extremely vast, and according to Dr. Hartmut-Ortwin Feistel of the Berlin State Library, Prussian Cultural Heritage, Oriental Department, who is engaged in an ongoing German cataloging project “Sanskrithandschriften aus den Turfanfunden (SHT),” some of these manuscript fragments “preserve Sanskrit texts or passages that were previously unknown to survive in Sanskrit.”
This indicates the rich Sanskrit scholarship prevalent in the historic Turfan oasis. Prof. Dr. Shashibala, a specialist in Buddhist iconography and cross-cultural connections among Asian countries, wrote in her book “Sanskrit on the Silk Route” that the Germans discovered a text from the Turfan site in which verses were composed in classical “meters such as Sikharini, Vasantatilaka and Praharsini.”
Classical Sanskrit meters (छन्दस्, chandas) are the regulated rhythmic patterns or quantitative patterns of syllables used to compose Sanskrit poetry, drama, philosophical verses, inscriptions, and religious literature.
Vasantatilakā, a classical Chanda (meter), has 14 syllables per pada and follows a characteristic long-short pattern. Śikhariṇī, another classical meter, has 17 syllables per pada and is frequently used in ornate Sanskrit poetry, while Praharsini has 13 syllables per pada and is used in classical lyrical poetry.
Classical meters in Sanskrit literature signify an evolved Sanskrit poetic tradition as well as an evolved tradition of phonetics in the Turfan oasis. This evolved Sanskrit linguistics, some of which is indigenous, suggests that an extremely rich institutional ecosystem existed in the oasis for Sanskrit and translation scholarship.
One manuscript worth mentioning in this context is conventionally known as the Turfan Chāndoviciti — a collection of Sanskrit verses illustrating different meters. It was published by Dieter Schlingloff in 1958 as volume 5 of Sanskrittexte aus den Turfanfunden (Sanskrit Texts from the Turfan Finds), which contains Sanskrit verses that exemplify various meters. It is significant because it shows that Buddhists in the ancient Turfan oasis were studying Sanskrit grammar, meter, and Buddhist Sanskrit poetry by approximately the 4th–5th century. This indicates an evolved School of Sanskrit studies in the Turfan oasis on the northern leg of the Silk Route.
Sanskrit linguistic and phonetic traditions also had a profound influence on local linguistic traditions. Dieter Gunkel of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich wrote in a paper titled “The Sanskrit source of the Tocharian 4×25-syllable meter” that the Tocharians’ classical meter tradition is independent of the Indian tradition (Tocharian meter).
“The supposed independence of the metrical form of Tocharian poetry may seem surprising, given that the poetic texts are translations and adaptations of Buddhist Sanskrit originals,” Gunkel said.
Temples of Berzeklik and their Sanskrit inscriptions
Berzeklik, synonymous with the Berzeklik thousand-Buddha caves, is one of the most important historical sites in the Turfan oasis, located south of the village of Murtuk –about 11 miles from Toyok (Tuyugou Grottoes). According to Shashibala, travelers on the northern branch of the Silk Road reached Berzeklik by “following the gorge of Sengin northward as far as the point where Murtuk brook flows into the Sengin river.”
“The high cliffs on the right bank have to be climbed in order to find a narrow winding path that leads along the cliff top to the great monastic complexes of Berzeklik, protected from the unwelcome visitors. Temples and settlements were built as far as possible from the profane world,” said Shashibala, adding that more than 80 caves have survived, and 40 of them were decorated with paintings and inscriptions, including those in Sanskrit.
The caves span a long period of development from the 5th-6th centuries to the 9th-13th centuries; the Sanskrit heritage here is more elaborate, including manuscripts, narrative paintings, and Sanskrit inscriptions on the walls.
Berzeklik was discovered by the Germans during the Great Game period of early 20th century and Le Coq visited it along with his expedition documenting murals and other objects. A lot of what Le Coq gathered entered the collections of the Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin and other German institutions.
There’s a substantial body of contemporary scholarship on the Sanskrit inscriptions from the Buddhist caves of Berzeklik. A 2025 study by Xiaonan Li and Aifeng Chen examined Sanskrit inscriptions in Berzeklik Cave No. 16, which contain many verses from the Saṃyuktāgama, a major collection of early Buddhist discourses from the Sarvāstivāda school that I discussed in my last column.
The Sarvāstivāda school itself represents the transmission of Buddhism along the ancient Silk Road — it was a school of Buddhism that emerged in northern India and became particularly strong in Mathura, Gandhāra, and Kashmir before spreading along the Silk Route to Central Asia.
“These inscriptions are written above and below each of the small wall paintings of preaching scenes on the longitudinal barrel vault ceiling of this cave. A series of verses from the Saṃyuktāgama has been found among them,” Li and Chen wrote.
This research was important because much of the Saṃyuktāgama survives today only in Chinese translation, rather than in complete Sanskrit manuscripts. This suggests that the inscriptions in Cave 16 can help reconstruct the Sanskrit versions of individual passages from the Saṃyuktāgama.
Like Cave 16, other caves at Bezeklik also contain Sanskrit inscriptions. In addition to those inscriptions, the German expeditions collected and purchased many fragments of Sanskrit manuscripts from the Bezeklik cave site.
Xuanzang’s travels in Turfan
In AD 629, Xuanzang, the famous 7th-century Tang monk who traveled from China to ancient India in search of Buddhist scriptures, stayed in the Turfan Oasis for one month on his way to the Indian subcontinent.
Valerie Hansen of Yale University writes in her essay, “The Astonishing Finds from the Turfan Oasis–What they Reveal about the History of Silk Road,” that for Xuanzang, leaving China was difficult because the Tang dynasty, founded only eleven years earlier, had forbidden all travel.
“Xuanzang made his way to the northwestern border town of Dunhuang and one night escaped under the cover of darkness. He then had to choose the safest route to his destination. He initially planned to bypass Turfan, even though the oasis lay on the eastern end of the much travelled highway to Samarkand (in today’s Uzbekistan),” said Hansen.
He traveled along the Silk Road through Turfan, the capital of the kingdom of Gaochang under ruler Qu Wentai (麴文泰). Though not ethnically Chinese, Qu Wentai was a devout Buddhist who supported Buddhist institutions, including Sanskrit scholarship. Before Xuanzang arrived, another Indian monk, Kumārabuddhi, was in Gaochang. Kumārabuddhi’s presence in this corridor provides the clearest evidence of Sanskrit scholarly links between the Gaochang/Turfan region and China.
He’s known as a purohita (state preceptor) from Turfan, working with the Chinese monk Dao’an (道安, 312–385), who led large institutional Sanskrit-to-Chinese translation teams after arriving in China. Interestingly, the concept of purohita persists today in many dharmic communities in India, in varied forms.
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