The Daśakarmapathāvadānamālā (DKPAM) is, alongside the Maitrisimit, one of the most comprehensive Old Uyghur Buddhist texts which were translated from Tocharian and belongs to those texts which were produced in the early period of the history of Uyghur Buddhism. Because of its importance, the DKPAM has been investigated by many scholars from different perspectives for almost a century now – Jens Wilkens is just one of them. He has worked intensively on the DKPAM and has already published not only a considerable number of articles containing studies of individual stories, but also a catalogue for the DKPAM fragments. Thus this edition is the crowning achievement of his research on this important Old Uyghur Buddhist text.
The edition contains an introduction, several concordances of the fragments, transcriptions, German translations, commentaries, facsimiles of the joined fragments, a glossary, transliterations, and a bibliography. In the introduction important information on the DKPAM is briefly summarized and its linguistic characteristics are discussed. Chapter 1.5, “New identifications, joints and localizations” shows that Wilkens has made significant progress since his 2010 catalogue of the fragments on the Buddhist narratives (including the DKPAM) preserved in the Berlin Turfan Collection. Because of this serious progress, it would have been more helpful for users if the numbers of the fragments in the catalogue were given at least in one of the concordances. Apart from those changes mentioned in chapter 1.5, a comparison between the edition and the catalogue shows only one different identification. In the catalogue the fragment Mainz 466 was identified as a part of the Rāma narrative, while this signature was taken as a part of the DKPAM in the edition (see concordance p. 158). Because neither the line number in the edition nor that of the transliteration of this fragment was given, it must have been included simply by mistake. In this context, the reader additionally has to refer to P. Zieme's review of this book, published on academia.edu in June 2016 (P. Zieme, “Notizen zur Edition der altuigurischen Daśakarmapathāvadānamālā von Jens Wilkens (Berliner Turfantexte XXXVII)”. Zieme was able to identify additional fragments in the Berlin Turfan Collection and St Petersburg Collection as belonging to the DKPAM.
Wilkens has already pointed out that the close relationship of the Old Uyghur version of the DKPAM to the Tocharian one is also reflected in the use of words and the syntax. Those topics were discussed in individual articles, most of which were recently presented as the result of the co-operative research with Tocharologists like M. Peyrot and J.-G. Pinault. Still, a brief introductory description on the characteristic use of certain words or the unusual syntax in the DKPAM would have been useful for the reader. Of course, the additional chapters on those topics would have further increased the number of pages: this would have been a serious problem for this edition, which consists of three huge volumes. From this perspective it may be noted that the transliteration might have been excluded from such a comprehensive text. The importance of the transliteration is unquestionable in view of the transcription system used, which is widespread especially in Germany. But because of the contents of the DKPAM, readers will not all be Turkologists, so discussions on the above-mentioned topics would most probably have been welcomed by many readers. For the same reason, several entries for the basic words could have been omitted from the glossary.
Considering the enormous size of the DKPAM, it is a reasonable decision that the commentary is mostly limited to notes on simple linguistic features or the different readings compared to previous research. Thus further detailed research on the different topics of the DKPAM is to be expected. Still there are several terms and sentences which seem to be interesting for the user of this book. As Wilkens notes, his German translation is not fully literal, and most of the differences between the Old Uyghur text and the corresponding translation are not discussed explicitly. Detailed comments and Turkological discussions on words and sentences were given by Zieme in his review. Thus here only a few remarks which seems to be useful especially for non-Turkologist readers are given: pp. 210–1, ll. 00152–00153: The terminology udan uguš “Udan-Stamm” is important especially for the discussion on the Uyghur legend of the founding father. About the interpretation of the word udan, a new proposal has been made by Fu Ma in The Western Regions Literature and History, vol. 8, 2013. pp. 300–1, ll. 01810-01823: The corresponding translation was repeated without any explanation. So far as the original text shows there is no reason to double the translation. pp. 318–9, ll. 02143-02144: The two sentences bo etiglig ol : bo etigsiz ol “It is constructed. It is not constructed” are not translated into German. pp. 860–1, l. 11886: The use of the term koša lun “Abhidharmakośa śāstra”, which is borrowed from Chinese jushelun 倶舎論, is worthy of attention. Considering the fact that the DKPAM was translated from Tocharian, the use of the corresponding Sanskrit form is expected. Many titles and authors of the Abhidharma texts appear in their Sanskrit form in Old Uyghur so that the Uyghur Buddhist surely knew the Sanskrit form of these terms at some stage. On the other hand, a large proportion of the Old Uyghur Abhidharma texts have had a close connection to Chinese ones and sometimes contain Chinese characters. Even some Abhidharma texts partly written in Brāhmī script show a close relationship with their Chinese counterpart. This indicates that the Old Uyghur Abhidharma texts often stood under the strong influence of Chinese ones. The use of the term koša lun in the DKPAM is interesting in light of the transformation of the Abhidharma text into Uyghur.
