To the Blessed Memory of Ikeda Sensei
Irina F. Popova is a Russian sinologist and historian. Since April 2003, she has been the Director of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IOM RAS) at Saint Petersburg, Russia. She is also Head of the Department of Manuscripts and Documents of the IOM RAS, and Full Professor at St. Petersburg University.
Irina F. Popova
On November 15, 2023, Daisaku Ikeda, the President of the Soka Gakkai International (SGI), the last modern Buddhist philosopher, thinker and international public figure, who influenced the ideology of many people all around the world, passed away.
All my colleagues who had an opportunity to meet Ikeda Sensei in person were very much influenced by his generosity, heartiness and advertence to their feelings, needs and perceptions. For all his life Ikeda Sensei was patiently working for uniting people of different nations, common and educative, different by their inner world, by their traditions and values. His ideology was developed from the Lotus Sutra and the teachings by the 13th century Buddhist sage Nichiren. The long and fruitful collaboration of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IOM RAS; then the Saint Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies) with the Institute of Oriental Philosophy (IOP) was based on the introducing the unique manuscripts of the Lotus Sutra for the open public, not only academic, but all those, who wants to know about it.
The Agreement on scholarly collaboration between IOM RAS and IOP was signed on November 30, 1996. At that time, the director of the Saint Petersburg Branch Prof. Yury Ashotovich Petrosian (1930–2010); the deputy director Prof. Yevgeny Ivanovich Kychanov (1932–2013); and the head of the Manuscript and Document Department Prof. Margarita Iosifovna Vorobyova-Desyatovskaya (1933–2021) visited Japan and had a chance to meet with Dr. Ikeda Daisaku. At that year the Academic Counsel of the IOM RAS by a solid vote elected Ikeda Sensei a honorary member of the Institute.
The first major joint project of IOM and IOP was the organization of “The Lotus Sutra and Its World: Buddhist Manuscripts of the Great Silk Road” exhibition that opened at the Soka Gakkai Josei Toda International Center in Shinjuku, Tokyo, in November 1998. It featured 47 manuscripts and woodcut books with Buddhist content in 14 languages from the Saint Petersburg collection. The exhibition was a great success, attracting many visitors with an appreciation of Buddhist culture, ancient writings, and the history of Central Asia. One of the primary reasons for such interest from the public was the inclusion in the display of remarkable manuscript copies of the Lotus Sutra in the Tangut language and the famous Petrovsky Manuscript in Sanskrit.
The decision to include works in the Tangut language in the “Lotus Sutra and Its World” exhibition was taken not only for their uniqueness, but also for the special significance that their study had to the history of Russo-Japanese scholarly and cultural ties. In Japan, the language and writing system of the Tangut people was first studied by the eminent scholar, linguist, and ethnographer Ishihama Juntaro (1888–1968), who collaborated for many years with the outstanding Russian researcher Nikolai Alexandrovich Nevsky (1892–1937).
Staying in Japan from 1915, Nevsky became a part of the Japanese intellectual community, publishing papers in Japanese scholarly journals and participating in the Local Historians’ Society (Kyodo-kai) headed by the eminent Japanese scholars Orikuchi Shinobu (1887–1953) and Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962). In 1929, eager to engage in the deciphering of the Tangut texts, Nevsky returned to his homeland, where he devoted eight years to the study of the Tangut fund till 1937, when he was arrested and summarily executed. Nevsky’s endeavors were continued at the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies by the Tangut Studies Group, which was headed from 1963 by another talented Sinologist, Tangut scholar, and historian of Central Asia Yevgeny Kychanov. For many years Prof. Kychanov collaborated with the leading Japanese Tangut scholar Prof. Nishida Tatsuo (1928–2012), a pupil of Ishihama Juntaro.
The “Lotus Sutra and Its World” exhibition in 1998 was accompanied by the publication of a catalogue with parallel Japanese and English texts (‘The Lotus Sutra and Its World: Buddhist Manuscripts of the Great Silk Road. Manuscripts and Block Prints from the Collection of the St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies’) with leading scholars from Russia and Japan participating in its creation.
In 2005, the IOP published (as number 6 in the Series of Lotus Sutra Manuscripts) a color facsimile of the Tangut-language Lotus Sutra from the collection of the IOM: Xixia Version of the Lotus Sutra from the Collection of the St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Tang 218), edited by Prof. Nishida.
In 2013, the Petrovsky Manuscript was published as number 13 in the same series: Sanskrit Lotus Sutra Manuscripts from the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Facsimile Edition (SI P/ll), edited by Mr. Mizufune Noriyoshi. In Russia, this text has been studied by Sergei Fedorovich Oldenburg (1863–1934), Vladimir Svyatoslavovich Vorobyev-Desyatovsky (1927–1956), and Margarita Iosifovna Vorobyova-Desyatovskaya. Due to its unique character, this manuscript quite quickly became an object of study by the international scholarly community.
In the 1950s, Vladimir Vorobyev-Desyatovsky engaged in the study of works in the Serindia fund, where the Petrovsky Manuscript is kept. His widow, Margarita Vorobyeva-Desyatovskaya, continued his work on the Indian-languages fragments in the collection. It was primarily through her efforts, as well as the contribution of Grigory Bongard- Levin (1931–2009) and Eduard Temkin (1928–2019), that in 1985, pages from the Petrovsky Manuscript of the Lotus Sutra from the Leningrad/ Saint Petersburg collection were published in one of the issues of Pamyatniki indiiskoi pis'mennosti iz Tsentral’noi Azii [Indian Written Monuments from Central Asia] in facsimile, with transliteration, a study and commentary (Moscow: Vostochnaya literatura, 1985) (Pamyatniki pis’mennosti Vostoka, LXXIII, 1; Bibliotheca Buddhica; XXXIII)[1].
Another significant event that the IOM RAS held in conjunction with the IOP, this time with the participation of the Association Culturelle Soka de France, was the “Buddhist Sutras: A Universal Spiritual Heritage—Manuscripts and Iconography of the Lotus Sutra” exhibition in the halls of the UNESCO headquarters in Paris from April 2 to 10, 2016. For this exhibition, the IOM RAS provided 27 original manuscripts from Central Asia, some of them absolutely unique. A catalogue was published for the opening of the exhibition[2] containing reproductions of the exhibits from Saint Petersburg and other world collections.
All this many years scholarly cooperation between IOM RAS and IOP was inspired by Dr. Ikeda Daisaku, who set up the main streams and ideas for this exchange. Besides, IOP for a long time was sending to IOM books on the history of Buddhist ideology of Japan, that makes the better understanding and keeping the ways between peoples of our two nations. A big number of the books were written by Dr. Ikeda Daisaku personally. Through teachings of Ikeda Sensei, we got the original ideas for making peace and stability around the world just let people to be themselves.
[First carried in The Institute of Oriental Philosophy, Newsletter No.10, April 2023 to March 2024]
