The oldest Buddhist texts in the world are crumbly, prone to flaking into pieces at any time. Even conservators can't touch them with their bare hands.

Before they were found, the oldest manuscripts that scholars could study — texts from Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand — were only a few hundred years old and often damaged by the tropical climate.

Mark Allon, one of 20 people in the world who can read the scrolls' ancient language, says in comparison, the crumbling birch bark artefacts take researchers "way, way back".

"It's taking us very close, closer to the Buddha," he says.

Dr Allon leads the team at the University of Sydney that is digitising some of the 2,000-year-old manuscripts, which have only recently been unfurled.

Through his work, the public will soon be able to see them online and understand their ancient teachings.

Handling crumbling relics

Around 200 of these scrolls were discovered in the mid-1990s along the northern border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

They came from the ancient kingdom of Gandhara, which flourished between 100 BC and 200 AD and acted as a gateway for Buddhism to travel from India into China.

Many of the scrolls were found in caves in the Bamiyan province in Afghanistan, when the Taliban destroyed ancient Gandharan buddhas carved into rock.

An Afghan man walks past the remains of the Giant Buddha destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. ( Reuters )

The scrolls spent the last two millennia folded in half, interred in clay pots.

The long shape of the scrolls and the way they are rolled up differentiates them from other artefacts in the area.

"They are cigar-like ... they are very fragile. You need to expose them to moisture over several days and then slowly tease out the layers," Dr Allon explains.

"They are very fragmentary. They fall to pieces."

The manuscripts contain prayers, stories of the past lives of the Buddha, monastic training rules and philosophical discourses.

Bringing earliest Buddhism to life

Dr Allon has spent decades with these texts in their original languages.

He followed his sense of independence when he was a university student — choosing to study ancient languages so he could read the Buddhist teachings he was interested in.

"I realised that I really wanted to access the text myself and not rely on somebody else's translation, which can be problematic."

He learned Sanskrit, Tibetan, some Chinese and Pali, the liturgical language of the Theravada Buddhist canon, practised in South-East Asia.

It was the love of Buddhist ideas that inspired his interest in Gandhari, he says, "and the only way I could get to them was through the study of language".

Mark Allon is one of 20 people worldwide who can read the ancient Gandhari language. ( Supplied: Mark Allon )

Dr Allon is fascinated by the transmission of the Buddha's teachings from oral traditions into writing.

He credits faithful nuns and monks for doing their best in recording the doctrine and developing various narratives to best uncover the meaning at the heart of the writing.

Coming closer to the Buddha

Though these scrolls are the earliest known works of Buddhism, they don't necessarily put researchers in direct contact with the word of the Buddha.

"Writing is not used until many hundreds of years later," Dr Allon says. He describes the manuscripts as "very formulaic, structured and repetitive, so that the ... ideas could be transmitted faithfully".

The manuscript, from the northern border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, dates back to the first century BC. ( Supplied )

The way these manuscripts were stored harks back to the practice of interring relics that belonged to the Buddha himself, who is quoted as saying: "Whoever sees my teaching sees me, and whoever sees me sees my teaching."

This lesson compelled monks and nuns to inter his hair, teeth, and his begging bowl in Gandharan monuments.

Such dharma or teaching relics "give that place potency", Dr Allon says. "The Buddha is present, his teaching is present."

And despite his decades of research, Dr Allon says he still has much more to learn.

"I'm still very personally interested, but of course this [research] is just a bottomless pit. You get sucked in."