Variations in Dunhuang Manuscripts

There are a vast number of Dunhuang manuscripts, many of which have some variant editions, especially for some important Buddhist scriptures with thousands of different versions, such as “The Diamond Sutra”, “Lotus Sutra” and “Mahaparinirvana Sutra”. In addition, the block-printed edition of some manuscripts have also been passed down. Due to various reasons, there exist more or less differences both in content and characters for their variant texts. In Liangfu Jiang’s “Introduction to Dunhuang Studies”, he says, “ two manuscripts with different characters could be called variants, which could help us tell what’s right and wrong.”