Research on the Religious Trends of Uigur Buddhism as Seen in the Buddhist Murals and Wall Insciptions

2019 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 16K13286
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: History of Asia and Africa
• Research Institution: Osaka University
• Principal Investigator: MATSUI Dai 大阪大学, 文学研究科, 教授 (10333709)
• Project Period (FY): 2016-04-01 – 2020-03-31
• Keywords: 中央アジア / 敦煌 / ウイグル / 仏教 / 石窟 / 壁画 / 題記銘文

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The target of this research project was integration of the art-historical analysis on the mural paintings in the Dunhuang Caves (Gansu Province, China) and other Buddhist cave sanctuaries in the eastern part of Central Asia and the philological decipherment of the Old Uighur inscriptions left in those caves.
Through the project we provided the edtion of the Old Uigur pilgrim inscription to prove the religious practices of the Uigur Buddhists. However, we had to postpone the final conclusion on the "trends" of the Uigur pilgrims, because we could not exhaustively assemble information on them under many restriction on our fieldwork at the Dunhuang Caves, to be further investigated in future.

Free Research Field

アジア・アフリカ史

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

仏教学・美術史学の観点に立つ中央アジア仏教石窟壁画の分析と，古ウイグル語題記銘文資料の言語学・文献学的解読の成果を，仏教信仰の継受・変容という視点から直接に架橋することを試みたものである。これらの研究分野は中国の"一帯一路"政策の影響で国際学界でも関心が高まっており。今後も現地調査を継続することで，新規性かつ独創性のある歴史研究の方法論を日本の学界から提示することにつながる。