[originaltext] Today, we are going to continue our discussion of Buddhism. I

Today, we are going to continue our discussion of Buddhism. In our last class, we talked about how it practiced. Today, I’d like to talk a little about early Buddhism, which we really don’t know much about. Well, what is known is that the teachings of Buddhism were memorized, and passed on orally for centuries by its followers. Recently, there was an important discovery of Buddhist manuscripts that are believed to be the oldest ever found. They may be 2,100 years old. And there maybe as many as 20 of them. It’s expected that we will be able to learn from them about the spread of Buddhism from present day India into China, and throughout Asia. But the scrolls themselves have presented challenge too. They were very fragile, found rolled up in clay pots. Before they even could be looked at, they need to be dampened over night in fact, and then carefully flattened with tweezers. And it’s not that anybody could just sit down and read them. The scrolls were written in a language that is really rare today. Only a few people are proficient at it. Considering these challenges, it’s easy to understand why it takes scholars so long to examine the scrolls.