The famous brich-bark manuscript in the Kharosthi script, which contains a recension of the Dharmapada in a Prakrit dialect, has long been familiar to students of early Buddhist literature under the name of Ms. Dutreuil de Rhins. The manuscript, written in the first or second century A.D., is generally considered to be the oldest surviving manuscript of an Indian text. It was discovered near Khotan in Central Asia in 1892, and reached Europe in two parts, one of ...