Although Japanese-Hungarian relations were quite close during the two World Wars, investigating this period of the history of the two countries’ relationship is a relatively new field of study. In Japanese library archives and university collections there is still a large number of historical documents which have not been studied so far. With the help of these we are able to conceptualize how the two nations’ images of each other were formed and changed over time.

The fundamental method applied in this project was the comparison of written and visual sources, more specifically of the Chinese/non-Chinese written Manichaean sources with the Chinese Manichaean visual sources. This method proved to be fruitful in terms of the basic goal: to gain a better understanding of various aspects of Chinese Manichaeism. Another result was that the new Chinese Manichaean pictorial discoveries can relatively well be interpreted in the context of non-Chinese Manichaean traditions. It is especially intriguing that such a temporally and geographically distant written corpus as the Coptic Manichaica can offer numerous clues to decipher motifs in these new paintings. The third important result is that it could be demonstrated that though the message of the Chinese Manichaean corpus is undoubtedly Manichaean, the language it uses is Buddhist; thus, Buddhism served as a medium for both the written and the visual Manichaean material. This means that Chinese Manichaean written expressions and visual motifs can and, in the majority of the cases, must be first assigned a Buddhist meaning, and only after that can one interpret the given expression or motif in the Manichaean context. Interestingly, the way the written materials from the Tang dynasty apply Buddhism as a language is different from that of the visual remains from the Yuan and Ming dynasty.

This research was based on the fact that the majority of the Chinese Manichaean scriptures were translated from a Middle Iranian language, thus the Chinese texts usually contain concepts that were known − among others − from the Iranian Manichaean context. On the other hand, the Chinese texts naturally have their own characteristics, and most often reflect the contemporary Chinese religious concepts. The interaction of the original (in this case: Middle Iranian) Manichaean concept and the Chinese Manichaean terms is thus an important topic for investigation.

The research covered the following sub-topics:
I. METAPHORS USED IN CHINESE MANICHAEAN TEXTS AND THEIR IRANIAN COUNTERPARTS;
II. THE MANICHAEAN PAINTING IN BEZEKLIK (CAVE 38);
III. THE PHILOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF CHINESE MANICHAEAN TEXTS;
IV. THE YAMATO BUNKAKAN MANICHAEAN PAINTING;
V. THE BUDDHIST TERMINOLOGY USED IN THE CHINESE MANICHAEAN SCRIPTURES.

The results of the project can be classified at different levels: 1. The philological work in the background (collection and translation of the primary sources, revised edition of original texts) was the indispensable first step towards later results, which constitutes at the same time an important contribution in its own right to Manichaean studies. 2. The most important outcomes – in our opinion – are the scholarly essays which analyze various (historical, terminological) aspects of the relationship between Manichaeism and Buddhism in a detailed manner. It was demonstrated for example that the Buddhist titles of Mānī also have many parallels outside the Buddhist world. 3. Further and more general results to be mentioned are the theoretical implications that can be deduced from the conclusions of the specific essays. These include the exploration of the sophisticated semantic relationship between the Buddhist and the Manichaean aspects of specific expressions, the results of which can be perhaps later be transferred to the analysis of similar contacts between other religions.