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Three More Sanskrit Inscriptions of Arakan
Arlo Griffiths — École française d’Extrême-Orient
In his article “Some Sanskrit Inscriptions of Arakan,” published posthumously in 1944, the British Sanskrit scholar E.H. Johnston was the first to bring to the attention of the scholarly world the existence of a substantial epigraphic tradition in Sanskrit language on Burmese soil. While other parts of Burma have never yielded even a handful of inscriptions in Sanskrit, significant further finds of Sanskrit epigraphic material in Arakan have continued to be made over the decades after Johnston’s seminal study, gradually revealing more of the depth and breadth of this tradition. Some of these new finds have been published in the reports of the Archaeological Survey of Burma (1959, 1960, 1964, 1965), by the Arakanese scholar San Tha Aung (1974) and by the renowned Indian epigraphist D.C. Sircar (1957–58, 1967, 1976). Since then, no major publications have followed except a paper by Kyaw Minn Htin (2011), which focuses on a single type of inscription, namely the rather numerous short inscriptions comprising citation of the ye dharmāḥ formula alone, or accompanied by short dedicatory statements, often in very garbled language.
The Arakan tradition of Sanskrit epigraphy is limited chronologically to roughly the second half of the first millennium CE, and forms only the first chapter of the epigraphical history of Arakan. After a gap of several centuries without any local epigraphical production, an Arakanese vernacular tradition starts in about the fourteenth century and forms the second chapter of this history. While a comprehensive publication and historical evaluation of the Arakan Sanskrit corpus is a long-term aim which the present author initially undertook in collaboration with the late P. Gutman and is now pursuing on his own, the more modest aim of the present paper is to provide editions of three Sanskrit inscriptions so far unpublished, in order tom illustrate some of the significance of this material to the history of Arakan while simultaneously emphasizing the numerous challenges inherent in doing historical and philological justice to the Arakan Sanskrit corpus.
