The Dunhuang documents kept in the Dunhuang Academy contain many Buddhist manuscripts.Some of them are recorded in the Tripitaka of past times,and some are not.178V,which is discussed in this paper, belongs to the latter.The image of this manuscript can be seen in the first volume of the Dunhuang Documents in Gansu Collections.It has a postscript,which identified the text as the Sutra of the Eight Teachers and said it was not the version translated by Zhi Qian in the Wu Kingdom of the Three Kingdoms Period but by someone whose name was unknown.By comparing this manuscript with the version of Zhi Qian,and by bibliographically investigating the translator of this sutra,the author comes to the conclusion that this manuscript was very likely the version recorded in the Records of Three Treasures in the Past Dynasties,which was translated by Dharmaraksa in the Eastern Jin Dynasty.Therefore,the version of 178V provides a new material for studying the Buddhist sutrastranslated by Dharmaraksa as well as the history of Chinese Buddhist translation. This paper also points out that the relationship between 178V and the first five lines of the Fentanboda-jing kept in Nanjing Museum helps identifies the first five lines of that text as from the Sutra of the Eight Teachers,corresponding to the part that is lost in 178V.
