The Bakhshali Manuscript is an Ancient Indian mathematical manuscript written on birch bark which was found near the village of Bakhshali in 1881 in what was then the North-West Frontier Province of British India (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, in Pakistan). It's written in Śāradā script and in Gatha dialect (which is a combination of the ancient Indian languages of Sanskrit and Prakrit). The manuscript is incomplete, with only seventy leaves of birch bark, many of which are mere scraps. Many remain undiscovered. The Bakhshali manuscript, which is currently too fragile to be examined by scholars, is currently housed in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford (MS. Sansk. d. 14).

Its date is uncertain, and has generated considerable debate. Most scholars agree that the physical manuscript is a copy of a more ancient text, so that the dating of that ancient text is possible only based on the content. Recent scholarship dates it between the 2nd c. BC and the 3rd c. AD; Ian Pearce summarizes the positions:

Bakhshali is a village and union council in Mardan District of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. It is located at 34°17'0N 72°9'0E and has an altitude of 307 metres (1010 feet).

The village is notable for being the location of what is now known as the Bakhshali manuscript; this is an ancient mathematical work written on birch bark and is the oldest surviving document in South Asia of Indian mathematics. It was discovered in 1881 during British rule by a tenant of Mian An-Wan-Udin, a police inspector; the manuscript was discovered while the tenant was digging in an abandoned building. The village also lends its name to the Bakhshali approximation which is a method of finding an approximation to a square root that was described in the manuscript. Mian Zahoor Hayat kakahel is the father of Bakhshli

In March 2007 there were attacks made on music shops in Bakhshali. Two people were injured and one was killed in attacks by an unidentified extreme group who attacked the bazaar shooting and killing the watchman of the Seven Stars music centre.