Chapter 8: The Texts We Let Die

This chapter is part of the book The Sacred Editors: Lost Texts.

"Not everything sacred was burned. Some things we simply stopped copying."

In the high desert caves of Dunhuang and the monasteries of the Tarim Basin, Buddhist monks once chanted in languages now almost entirely forgotten: Tocharian A and B, Sogdian, Khotanese. These were once vibrant liturgical tongues, used to transmit Mahāyāna sutras and intricate commentaries along the Silk Road's Buddhist networks.

Tocharian, an Indo-European language family, served Buddhist communities from the 3rd to 10th centuries CE. Sogdian functioned as a lingua franca for merchants and monks across Central Asia. Khotanese preserved unique tantric texts and Mahāyāna philosophical treatises. Each language carried distinctive interpretations of Buddhist doctrine, adapted to local cultures and spiritual needs.¹

But when the Silk Road trade declined and Islam became dominant in Central Asia, the Buddhist communities there withered. Monasteries emptied. Pilgrimage routes changed. No armies came to burn their libraries—but over time, the scrolls crumbled, uncopied, unread.

By the time European archaeologists arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these languages were already extinct. They found thousands of fragments—but few who could decipher them. The monks had left. Their chants had ceased. The texts died of neglect.

The Mandaeans, a small Gnostic religious group tracing their lineage to John the Baptist, maintain a unique corpus of sacred texts—written in a dialect of Eastern Aramaic and inscribed with esoteric cosmology, baptismal rites, and ethical teachings. The Ginza Rabba, their central scripture, exists in only a few complete manuscript copies.

Mandaeans have long been a vulnerable minority in Iraq and Iran. As their communities fractured under political pressure and migration, the hereditary priesthood that once maintained ritual transmission has dwindled. Scholar Jorunn Buckley documents how the 2003 Iraq War and subsequent sectarian violence scattered Mandaean families worldwide, breaking traditional chains of priestly education and manuscript copying.²

There was no bonfire. But the chain of scribes thinned. The scrolls became brittle. In diaspora, younger generations rarely learn the script. Digital preservation efforts exist—but without ritual context, the texts risk becoming museum pieces rather than living scripture. One Mandaean priest, now living in Australia, put it bluntly: "We have the words. But who will speak them in prayer?"

Similar patterns of quiet extinction affected commentarial traditions worldwide. In many religious traditions, commentary is continuity. Torah without midrash. Qur'an without tafsir. Vedas without bhāṣya. These interpretive traditions—often massive, dynamic, evolving—have been disrupted countless times by war, political upheaval, and institutional collapse.

In Confucianism, the Cultural Revolution silenced classical study for a generation. The destruction of libraries and persecution of scholars severed centuries-old lineages of textual interpretation. When study resumed, much of the nuanced exegetical tradition had to be reconstructed from fragments.³

In Judaism, the Holocaust obliterated centuries of Eastern European rabbinic commentary and yeshiva traditions. Entire schools of Talmudic interpretation, local customs of halakhic reasoning, and Hasidic storytelling traditions vanished with their communities. The survivors who rebuilt Jewish intellectual life had to work from incomplete memories and scattered texts.

In Islam, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of colonial modernity fragmented traditional madrasa networks. Local commentarial traditions, Sufi interpretive practices, and regional schools of jurisprudence lost their institutional support. While the Qur'an itself remained unchanged, the rich ecosystem of interpretation around it was substantially diminished.

In Christianity, mystical traditions like those of Hadewijch or Marguerite Porete were condemned and forgotten until rediscovered centuries later. Medieval women's theological writings, often preserved only in vernacular languages, disappeared as Latin scholasticism became dominant. Without teachers, many of these texts were no longer understood—even if they survived materially.

Many sacred traditions included female-centered knowledge that was rarely written down—ritual songs, healing prayers, midwifery blessings, domestic liturgies. When oral chains broke, this knowledge vanished without ever being cataloged. Christian women mystics of the medieval period often wrote in vernacular languages and were later suppressed or re-attributed to male authors. Hindu women's devotional poetry, like that of the bhakti saints, often survived only in fragments passed down orally. Jewish domestic rituals, such as tkhines (Yiddish women's prayers), fell out of use as communities assimilated.⁴

Indigenous ceremonial knowledge worldwide has disappeared with each elder's passing. African oral traditions face similar pressures from urbanization and language shift. These losses are hard to measure. There is no burned manuscript, no record of what was forgotten. Only gaps—and the haunting knowledge that something once vital is now irrecoverable.

Preservation, historically, was expensive. Copying a manuscript could take weeks or months. So communities prioritized what they considered essential: legal codes, foundational scripture, prestige commentaries. Others—stories, marginal writings, women's voices, liturgical variations—were simply not worth the cost.

In the Buddhist monastic economies of Southeast Asia, donor families funded recopying projects as merit-making acts. But they often chose high-status texts—never the obscure treatises or the regional myths. In the Islamic world, classical works of astronomy and philosophy were preserved in Persian libraries—but local dialectal commentaries and mystical texts were rarely recopied unless sponsored by elites.⁵

This wasn't malicious. It was pragmatic. But the result was a curated memory. What was deemed less important—however sacred—was slowly erased by scarcity. Similar economic pressures led to the disappearance of texts in medieval Christian monasticism, where copying resources were limited, and in Jewish diaspora communities, where the cost of manuscripts made preservation selective.

Had Tocharian or Sogdian Buddhism remained active, we might have deeper insights into how the Dharma adapted linguistically and cosmologically along the Silk Road. Lilla Russell-Smith's research on Central Asian Buddhist manuscripts reveals sophisticated philosophical syntheses that disappeared when these communities vanished. Their extinction narrows our view of Buddhist plurality and deprives us of alternative approaches to meditation and metaphysics.⁶

If the mystical commentaries of Christian women or Sufi women had remained widely accessible, theology today might hold a more intimate, embodied, or egalitarian character. The loss of these voices shaped subsequent theological development by privileging institutional over personal religious experience.

For Mandaeans and other small groups, preserving commentary traditions would allow them to define themselves theologically in the modern world—not just ethnographically. Without active interpretive traditions, minority religions often become frozen in time, unable to address contemporary challenges through their own intellectual resources.

Contemporary scholars emphasize the active nature of forgetting. Jan Nattier observes that "when texts stop being copied, that's not a neutral act. It's a decision—sometimes by omission, sometimes by intent—that this voice no longer needs to be heard. And silence is not the same as peace."⁷

Elizabeth Shanks Alexander notes that "we talk about 'the canon' as if it were stable. But what's truly fragile is the network of interpretation around it. You can preserve a scroll and still lose the worldview it carried." Her work on Jewish gender and religious practice reveals how the loss of women's interpretive traditions reshaped Judaism in ways that continue today.⁸

Nelly van Doorn-Harder, studying Islamic women's religious practices, warns that "in many cases, the text remains. But the community no longer knows how to read it. That is the final stage of loss—not burning, but estrangement."⁹

Catastrophic loss grabs headlines. But slow abandonment is often more widespread—and harder to notice. It happens in silence: when the last speaker dies, when no one funds the reprint, when migration severs the line of recitation.

Modern preservation efforts sometimes miss this. Projects like the International Dunhuang Project digitize thousands of Central Asian Buddhist manuscripts, while the Mandaean Associations of Australia and America work to preserve Mandaean liturgical texts in diaspora. Yet these efforts face the challenge of preserving not just texts but living traditions.¹⁰

We digitize the rare manuscript but forget the community who once read it aloud. We archive the chant but lose the breath behind it. If sacred memory is to survive, it must be lived, not just stored.

Notes

For Tocharian Buddhism, see Douglas Q. Adams, A Dictionary of Tocharian B (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013); for Sogdian Buddhist texts, see Nicholas Sims-Williams, Sogdian and Manichean Manuscripts in the Stein Collection(London: British Library, 1992).
Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 34-67.
Richard Curt Kraus, The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 89-103.
For Jewish women's prayers, see Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); for Hindu women's devotional poetry, see John Stratton Hawley and Mark Juergensmeyer, Songs of the Saints of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
For Buddhist manuscript economies, see Peter Skilling, "Redaction, Recitation, and Writing: Transmission of the Buddha's Teaching in India in the Early Period," in Buddhist Manuscript Cultures, ed. Stephen C. Berkwitz (London: Routledge, 2009), 53-75.
Lilla Russell-Smith, Uygur Patronage in Dunhuang: Regional Art Centres on the Silk Road in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 145-167.
Jan Nattier, A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path According to the Inquiry of Ugra (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003), 15-18.
Elizabeth Shanks Alexander, Gender and Timebound Commandments in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 45-47.
Nelly van Doorn-Harder, Women Shaping Islam: Reading the Qur'an in Indonesia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 19-25.
For contemporary preservation efforts, see the International Dunhuang Project at idp.bl.uk and the Mandaean Associations of Australia (mandaeanaustralia.org.au) and America (mandaeanunion.org).

Notes

Further Reading