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CHAPTER III]
BOWER MANUSCRIPT
Irrespective of the details which distinguish the three styles of writing in Parts I-III, Parts V-VII, and Part IV respectively, it is impossible not to be impressed by the pronounced difference in the general appearance of the writing in those three portions of the Bower Manuscript. This circumstance leads to a further observation. On the blank space of the obverse of the leaf on which Part III ends, there is inscribed a remark, the exact purport of which is, at present, not intelligible. But it is obviously written by the same hand that wrote Parts V and VII. For, in addition to the general appearance of sameness, there occur in the remark those forms, previously explained of the letters and th, which are peculiar to the writer of Parts V and VII. On the reverse of that same leaf there is inscribed the commencement of Part IV. On the obverse of the third leaf of Part IV (see Plate XL), there is seen, written between the fourth and fifth lines, the brief remark na samiaya. This interlinear remark, too, is clearly in the handwriting of the scribe of Parts V and VII; for it comprises the peculiar and y of those Parts; for example, as will be seen by reference to Table I, the left-hand stroke of y of the remark curls to the left as in Parts V and VII, while in Part IV it curls to the right. The conclusion that may be drawn from the existence of the two remarks in the positions in which they occur is that after Parts I-III had been written, they passed into the hands of the writer of Part IV who began his writing on the blank page of the last leaf of Part III. Afterwards Parts I-IV passed into the hands of the writer of Parts V and VII, who added his explanatory remark to the final page of Part III, and his brief complementary remark on the third leaf of Part IV. Probably it was also he who put all the Parts together, and enclosed them as a collective manuscript between a pair of wooden boards. It may be suggested that the remark appended to the end of Part III, if we only understood it might refer to the monastic order or rank of the writer of Parts I-III. The interlinear remark in Part IV only adds a phrase which had been inadvertently omitted by the original writer.
The results of the foregoing enquiry may be summed up as follows. The writers of Parts I-III and Parts V-VII were natives of India who had migrated to Kuchar. They, no doubt, were Buddhist monks, and these, as is well known, were often in the habit of travelling, or migrating, for missionary or other purposes, into Foreign Parts. To judge from their style of writing, the scribe of Parts I-III originally came from the northern, and the two scribes of Parts V-VII from the southern part of the northern area of the Indian Gupta script. But the fact that they use birch-bark as their writing material shows that the country, from which more immediately they migrated to Kuchar, must have been Kashmir or Udyâna; and the quality of the birch-bark which they use suggests that they wrote their respective parts of the Bower Manuscripts after their settlement in Kuchar, when their store of birch-bark had run short. Parts V and VII probably were written about the same time as Parts I-III. The latter apparently were never completed. They passed, in their incomplete state, into the hands of the writer of Part IV, who would seem to have been a native of Eastern Turkestan, or perhaps of China. From him Parts I-IV passed into the hands of the writer of Parts V and VII, who added the two remarks above referred to. Part VI was written at a subsequent date by a fourth scribe on a fresh supply
