A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis: - Methodological Issues in the Study of a Mahāyoga Text from Dunhuang
A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis:Methodological Issues in the Study of a Mahāyoga Text from Dunhuang
Abstract: The Dunhuang manuscript IOL Tib J 321 is a Rnying ma tantra commentary in eighty-five folios, the Thabs kyi zhags pa padma ’phreng gi don bsdus pa’i ’grel pa’, with its root tantra embedded as lemmata. Marginal notes and a concluding verse of praise associate the work with Padmasambhava. Although cited by Rong zom pa and Klong chen pa, later Rnying ma pas lost touch with the commentary, available to them only in truncated form within Bstan ’gyur editions. The Dunhuang manuscript now enables reconstitution of the entire commentary. More complex is the root text’s transmission. Extant in all Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa (Rnying ma’i rgyud ’bum) and Bka’ ’gyur Ancient Tantra (Rnying rgyud) sections, the versions can differ substantially, raising fundamental questions of textual boundedness. The differences derive from a thousand years of imprecise differentiation between root and commentary in many major editions, persisting unresolved from Dunhuang times until now despite the survival of correctly bounded ancient versions at the cultural margins. Rnying ma responses to uncertain scriptural boundaries entailed a distributive approach to knowledge, at variance to some modern textual presuppositions.
We are grateful to the British Arts and Humanities Research Council for providing us with the funding that enabled the research on which this paper is based. We would also like to thank David Germano and the other anonymous reviewer who made comments on an earlier version of this paper. Parts of the paper were presented in 2009 and 2010 as lectures at Harvard, Chicago, Vienna and SOAS (University of London). We would like to acknowledge the comments which arose in the discussions on those occasions. Furthermore, at the final revision stages, Helmut Eimer and Helmut Tauscher drew our attention to the versions of the Thabs zhags found in the Independent Bka’ ’gyurs of ’Ba’ thang and of Hemis, and these additional witnesses have clarified our picture of the historical transmission of the text.
Introduction
This paper is a brief reflection on the culture of tolerable scriptural variation that we find in Rnying ma Buddhism. It raises methodological issues for textual scholars of the Rnying ma tantras, which, although specific to Rnying ma texts, might also shed useful comparative light on other genres. In comparing appropriate methodological approaches for the Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa and for the Bka’ ’gyur, the orthodox canonical collection which gained shape in the fourteenth century, we make two main points:
1. While current Bka’ ’gyur scholarship is, for entirely compelling reasons, inmany cases abandoning the hope of recovering unitary original texts or archetypes through philological analysis, study of the Rnying ma canon suggests the opposite. Our admittedly meager analysis so far tends towards the provisional conclusion that Rnying ma tantras may often have original redactorial moments, and should, in theory at least, present archetypes recoverable through philological methods. We certainly do believe we can partly succeed in recovering an archetype of the Thabs zhags root text, and will present our evidence for this in a forthcoming book. However, note well that neither the terms “original” nor “archetype” need always imply in the context of tantric texts independence from borrowings from earlier texts or freedom from orthographical or grammaticalerror! Those are quite different issues.
2. If Bka’ ’gyur scholarship is currently emphasising the non-unitary and variednature of texts before their incorporation into Tibetan canons, our work on the Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa is currently emphasising diversity after incorporation into Tibetan canons. Hence our second point, a little ironically, slightly devalues the first. Even if historians of the Rnying ma pa might (as we do here to some degree) enjoy the luxury of recovering very early archetypes or even originals through philological methods, this luxury is of partially limited value because the Rnying ma pas themselves do not operate in quite this way. On the one hand, their tantras have come to vary over time through scribal error and piecemeal attempts at correction, or, as in this instance, confusions between root text and commentary; and on the other hand, the Rnying ma pa have never sought to establish a centralized authority that could standardize their scriptures. Nor do they systematically identify or specify in their tantra catalogues the different versions of a text. Of course, there is little problem where one reading is clearly better than another – bad readings can be eliminated without controversy – but the cumulativeeffectofcenturiesofdissociatedhypercorrectionsmadewithoutrecourse to other editions, leads to an occasional variety of good readings, each equally plausible, each the potential basis of further learned exegesis. For example, the commentarial tradition on the tantric deity Rdo rje phur pa had to make sense of two rather different readings within the root verses on the creation of the deity’s maṇḍala (dkyil ’khor), even though these root verses are so important that they are shared by all the scriptural texts, and repeated in all major practice texts. Hence, despite in many cases apparently starting out with unitary texts or redactorial moments, the Rnying ma pa are by now no better off than the Bka’ ’gyur tradition. They have had to accept that in different editions and in different regions, ostensibly the same versions of important tantras can vary somewhat, at some points displaying what appear to be equally viable yet different readings. It is true that some Rnying ma bla mas aware of such discrepancies can sometimes bemoan this lack of uniformity. Yet de facto, for the last many centuries, the Rnying ma bla mas have had little option other than to live with it. Perhaps partly making a virtue out of necessity, but perhaps equally because of their ontological beliefs about bla mas and tantric texts, many of them do not seem to see this as an unmitigated problem. On the contrary, they seem in practice to have been compelled towards a distributiveunderstandingof knowledge, very like the understandingof Mahāyāna and tantric scriptures that often prevailed in India, in which each sound and meaningful variant version can be appreciated for contributing its partial vision of the Buddhas’ total authorial intention (bad readings are of course rejected without hesitation as the mistakes of scribes). The point should not be over-stated: bla mas will often insist on particular readings established in commentarial traditions in which they have been taught. Yet they will hesitate to dismiss or criticize alternatives presented by other bla mas of different commentarial traditions, and when pressed, may affirm that the alternative readings are valid for that other lineage of descent. To approach this within narrowly political terms: if a bla ma takes too strong a stand in rejecting one plausible good reading in favor of another plausible good reading, he incurs the risk of unwittingly challenging some other respected authority. If he could have near-total knowledge of all previous and present views, then he might be happier to take such a risk, but such complete knowledge is seldom available. What then, if Rin po che A were to take a radically exclusivist position today, only to find out tomorrow he had in doing so inadvertently labelled Gter chen B or Mkhan chen C as definitely mistaken? The embarrassment could be considerable. So dogmatism tends to be avoided, and the range of good readings cautiously tolerated. For most Rnying ma pa, the perfect and complete text of a tantra is not an historical archetype recoverable philologically: it is something that exists only in the tantric heavens or in the guardianship of the Ḍākinīs, of which extant terrestrial versions, including the philologist’s, are in all likelihood little more than imperfect partial reflections. We are not yet certain to what degree and in what way this partly ideological and partly pragmatic view is peculiar to the Rnying ma tantras, and to what degree it pervades other genres as well. We are aware of the variant versions of texts like the Heart Sūtra preserved in the Bka’ ’gyur, and we are equally aware of the perspective of modern scholars like Jonathan Silk and Paul Harrison, who understand Indian Mahāyāna scriptures as works in constant motion that never indigenously achieved a fixed entity. In addition, we are aware of the works by colleagues in parallel fields, notably the modern Talmudists, who have clarified the way in which anonymous collective scriptural authorship may work on the ground. Nevertheless, we do not want to extrapolate from other fields, but will ensure through careful collations that the Rnying ma texts talk to us directly with their own historical message.
Why Ancient Tantra Collection Texts Are so Valuable
The Rnying ma or “Ancient” school of Tibetan Buddhism, like the Bon, has the unusual distinction of basing its major tantric systems upon scriptures largely excluded from the Bka’ ’gyur. The Rnying ma response was to consolidate their tantras within their own compilation known as the Rnying ma’i rgyud ’bum, or the Ancient Tantra Collection, a process that achieved increasing maturity in the fifteenth century. In its fullest editions, this collection nowadays includes around one thousand works, in about thirty-five thousand folios, or seventy thousand pages. The provenance and authenticity of the Rnying ma tantras has been questioned in various ways from the turn of the eleventh century until the present day. Some considered them translated from Sanskrit, hence authentic; others considered them Tibetan compositions, hence inauthentic. Yet others, including the famous eleventh century Rnying ma sage Rong zom chos kyi bzang po, seemed to accept the possibility that they were compiled in Tibet, yet nevertheless deemed them authentic. Either way, the Rnying ma tantras have had, and continue to have, a very powerful influence on Tibetan religion.
Ancient Tantra Collection scriptures often become more widely known through references reproducing citations given in important commentarial works,6 rather than through direct reading of the source texts, although learned bla mas certainly could, did, and still do, have direct recourse to scriptural texts. The genre comes into view in the post-Imperial period. Modern academic analysis, including our own, finds that most Rnying ma scriptures studied so far resemble what Davidson7 has dubbed “gray” texts. Neither wholly Indian nor wholly Tibetan, they are Tibetan compilations in the style of Indian tantrism comprising predominantly Indic materials with some Tibetan admixture and localization. Our most reliable sources for the early Rnying ma are of course the Dunhuang Tantric texts. Recent research on them reveals a sophisticated and complex tantrism demonstrably continuous with the Rnying ma tantrism of later centuries, although with interesting differences too. More specifically, detailed comparative examinations of Dunhuang tantric materials with texts from the Ancient Tantra Collection now shows with certainty that the Ancient Tantra Collection does indeed conceal within its vast bulk a great deal of genuinely pre-Gsar ma pa Tantric materials.8 For those interested in studying the early history of Tantric Buddhism in Tibet, the Ancient Tantra Collection is thus potentially a treasure trove of information.
all) modern scholarship locates them somewhat later, mainly after the collapse of empire around 842. Interestingly, the criterion of Indian provenance used by the compilers of the Bka’ ’gyur to judge the authenticity of a tantra was not always fully accepted by Rnying ma pa scholars, such as the influential Rong zom pa. As Dorji Wangchuk puts it (Dorji Wangchuk, “An Eleventh-Century Defence of the Authenticity of the Guhyagarbha Tantra,” in The Many Canons of Tibetan Buddhism, edited by D. Germano and H. Eimer [[[Leiden]]: Brill, 2002], 282), “Rong zom pa’s response… does not categorically rule out the possibility of the tantra being a compilation or a composition by a Tibetan scholar… but rather addresses his opponents from a stance of spiritual ethics, trying to persuade them that in spite of such a possibility, one should approach the text with reason and respect on the basis of its scriptural coherency.” Wangchuk presents some passages from Rong zom pa’s work; perhaps most pertinent is the point that the Buddhas need not be restricted by time or place, or to superior Buddha-like bodies, but arise in response to the needs of sentient beings. Thus (in Wangchuk’s translation), “even if tantric treatises are taught with overlaps and so on, and even if it is possible that they were compiled and composed by [[[Tibetan]]] Upādhyāyas, they should not be considered objects of doubt, for the ways the blessings of the tathāgathas appear are not restricted” (rgyud kyi gzhung ldab bu la sogs par ston pa dang / gal te mkhan po rnams kyis bsdus shing sbyar ba srid na yang / de bzhin bshegs pa’i byin gyis rlabs byung ba la tshul nges pa med pa yin pas the tshom gyi yul du bya ba ma yin no/; Wangchuk, “Eleventh-Century Defence,” 283- C. Cantwell and R. Mayer, The Kīlaya Nirvāṇa Tantra and the Vajra Wrath Tantra: Two Texts from the Ancient Tantra Collection (Vienna: The Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2007), Ch. 2.V.
R. Davidson, “Gsar ma Apocrypha: The Creation of Orthodoxy, Gray Texts, and the New Revelation,” in The Many Canons of Tibetan Buddhism, edited by D. Germano and H. Eimer (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 212. 8 Our work on the Dunhuang texts relating to the tantric phur pa practices demonstrates substantial passages in common between the Dunhuang materials and Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa texts. See especially C. Cantwell and R. Mayer, Early Tibetan Documents on Phur pa from Dunhuang (Vienna: The Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2008), chapters 5 and 6.
Textual Obscurity and Scribal Corruption in the Extant Ancient Tantra Collection
Tibetology has known the historical potential of the Ancient Tantras since Rolf Stein’s time, yet use of them has remained slight, because they are so difficult to consult. One major problem is the lack of commentarial literature: only a very small proportion of Ancient Tantra Collection texts have extant commentaries, so that the root verses on their own frequently remain obscure even to the most learned bla mas.
Another problem is scribal corruption. We know from comparisons with Dunhuang manuscripts that much of the material in these texts is around one thousand years old, ample time for scribal errors to appear. When editing two Ancient Tantra Collection texts some years ago, we found around one word in three differing between our six witnesses. If punctuation was included, there was a statistical average of one variant for every three or four syllables. In addition to such small-scale variants, there are also larger ones, where longer passages, whole folios and entire chapters can vary, be lost, misplaced, or otherwise jumbled. Complete chapters can differ immensely across the different editions, to the extent that the average reader might wonder if they are the same text at all. When faced with such textual difficulties, Tibetan bla mas, like their Western counterparts, seek out other editions. Before the Cultural Revolution, there were undoubtedly more versions than there are today. As the major repository of their scriptural tradition, every major Rnying ma monastery once held a copy of the Ancient Tantra Collection, and several hundreds must have existed in the 1950s. Yet after the Cultural Revolution, only a handful are still available: four from Bhutan which are almost identical, a xylograph edition from Sde dge in East Tibet, and four manuscripts from northern Nepal and Southern Tibet which are related to one another. In short, we can currently muster only nine witnesses, representing three distinct traditions, and with the exception of the Sde dge xylograph, mainly drawn from the geographical peripheries of the Tibetan cultural region. Many famous manuscript editions of the past seem to have been lost, such as the collection made by Ratna gling pa in the fifteenth century, or ’Jigs med gling pa’s eighteenth century edition, and the library copies from major Rnying ma centers like Smin grol gling and Kaḥ thog have not yet reappeared, and might not have survived at all.
Increasing the Usability of the Ancient Tantra Collection Texts
Being so early and so influential, there is clearly an incentive to study Ancient Tantra Collection texts. The question is, how? Can we simply start reading them, with no particular regard to which edition, and without comparing the different editions? Or should we try to critically edit them first, carefully comparing manuscripts and assessing variant readings? Purists might argue that work on unedited Ancient Tantra Collection texts is unsafe, yielding little more than random impressions. Pragmatically speaking, that goes too far: especially at this very early stage in their study, useful insights can certainly be gained by browsing the texts just as one finds them. But undoubtedly we get a much finer and more nuanced understanding by editing the texts.
Tibetans themselves certainly made serious efforts to edit these texts, but circumstances conspired against them. The great bulk of the volumes, their rarity and expense, and the long distances separating the Tibetan cultural regions meant that Rnying ma editors could only rarely assemble a fully representative collection of their tantras for comparative purposes. Bringing one huge collection from far away was difficult enough; assembling all editions from everywhere almost impossible. Of necessity, Rnying ma editorial techniques for such huge collections more often relied on comparison with geographically proximate editions, accompanied by conjecture. We see evidence of this in the way that the nine available editions of the Ancient Tantra Collection follow distinctive regional affiliations. For example, the four editions from Bhutan often remain textually almost identical, slavishly reproducing exactly the same errors, lacunas, folio misplacements and good readings alike. Much the same can be said for the four editions from South Central Tibet and Northern Nepal, although across this more dispersed region, the homogeneity is less pronounced, so that, for example, some individual South Central texts can follow the Bhutanese recension. Likewise the Sde dge edition from far off East Tibet is entirely different from any of the South Central or Bhutanese editions, even though it is said to have some readings from Central Tibet. What we have read so far seems mainly to suggest the dominant influence of its several known Eastern Tibetan exemplars. Such empirical evidence suggests that, perhaps somewhat more than with the Bka’ ’gyur, regional traditions grew up, as new copies were made from editions nearby, with only occasional admixture from far-away editions. However, two words of caution need to be added here: the regional distinctions might in fact also have a sectarian element, and moreover are more typical of the times after canonical formation, rather than before. All the South Central texts might be Byang gter – we do not yet know – and all the Bhutanese ones are, of course, Padma gling pa tradition. By contrast, the Sde dge xylograph edition drew on seven different ma dpe making no sectarian distinctions. Only time, and the finding of further manuscripts, will give a broader picture of how regional and sectarian considerations interacted. Given that lineage differences within the Rnying ma pa school are so fluid and permeable, at this stage we tend to emphasizeregional factors. It must also be emphasised that regional differentiation grew with time, and that individual text versions could and did travel vast distances far more easily in the pre-canonical period, before they were thrown together into huge unwieldy collections. Hence we should see, as theory predicts, that the genuinely early text versions are not yet so affected by such regional factors.
In addition, we find evidence of conjecture in the redaction of Ancient Tantra Collection texts: one volume of the Rig ’dzin tshe dbang nor bu manuscript from South Central Tibet still preserves many emendations made in red ink, which on close analysis appear to be conjectural, made without systematic reference to other editions. This resembles the editorial styles still used by Tibetan bla mas in preparing new editions, in which intensive conjectural effort is typically invested into correction of orthographic and grammatical errors. However, where there are serious cruxes and no other editions to consult, the hazard of hypercorrection, as mentioned above, becomes serious. Aware of such a danger, even fine editions backed by powerful scholarly monastic institutions have sometimes preferred to reproduce obvious error, rather than attempt audaciously to insert corrections with no textual support. In fact, it is probable that deliberate conjectural correction was much less frequent in the transmission of these revered scriptural texts than in compilations of monastic liturgies and so on in everyday use. The corrections throughout half of one volume of the Rig ’dzin edition were clearly distinguished from the original text by their red coloring (unfortunately, not so clearly distinguishedfor modern users of the microfilmcopy), and we cannotknow whether these emendations were sanctioned. Certainly, they stop rather abruptly in the second half of the volume. In the carefully edited Sde dge edition, the only edition we know to have been prepared from a comparatively wide range of ma dpe including some from other regions, occasionally where uncertainty occurs, alternative readings are noted in marginal annotations.
Our belief is that this great manuscript tradition of the Ancient Tantra Collection richly deserves the best attentions of modern editorial technique, not only for the sake of modern academic scholars who find within it fascinating views into the ritual and religious world of post-Imperial Tibet, but also for the benefit of some millions of Tibetan Buddhists who revere these texts as the ultimate scriptural source of their religion.
How Do We Edit Ancient Tantra Collection Texts? Can We Stemmatize Them?
The question then arises, with no precedents to emulate, how does modern scholarship approach the editing of Ancient Tantra Collection texts? To start with, we turned to a near example for inspiration. The Ancient Tantra Collection shares the same methods of reproduction as the Bka’ ’gyur and, even if not quite so vast as the Bka’ ’gyur, is nevertheless of massive size and of comparable difficulty to transport long distances; like the Bka’ ’gyur, its texts are also mostly considered Buddhavacana, the actual speech of the enlightened ones. Hence it seemed rational to start by following the lead of such Bka’ ’gyur scholars as Helmut Eimer and Paul Harrison, who have attempted to use classic stemmatic analysis.
Stemmatic analysis is a method developed over recent centuries largely by Classicists and Biblical scholars. Its methods involve the systematic analysis of indicative errors, to infer lines of textual descent. From this, one can reconstruct, or partially reconstruct, an earliest ancestor, or archetype, from which all texts descend. But there are clear limits to what stemmatics can do, as scholars such as Bédier and Timpanaro have shown.
The Bka’ ’gyur scholars quickly ran into exactly such limitations. Stemmatics is based on the premise that the tradition is closed: in other words, that there is a single ancestor or archetype from which all existing versions of a text descend. Helmut Eimer had first set out, very reasonably, in the hope that a single translation of a text into Tibetan might function as such an archetype. But later research by Paul Harrison found that Bka’ ’gyur traditions can be open: in other words, he found that in some cases, the branches of the Bka’ ’gyur transmission may represent different recensions of a text, differing, for instance, in the Tibetan equivalents of Sanskrit terms. Soon after, Peter Skilling found that in a significant number of specific cases, texts from the Tshal pa and Them spangs ma lines cannot descend from a common source.14 Many Bka’ ’gyur texts underwent re-translations or revisions of earlier translations, and the versions in extant collections need not always stem from a single translation. Recent scholarly work on further witnesses, such as texts or text fragments in the proto-Bka’ ’gyur collections in Western Tibet, underlines this caution. For instance, Tomabechi discovered that the Tabo fragments of the Guhyasamāja are in parts close to the Dunhuang manuscript readings, perhaps preserving Rin chen bzang po’s (958-1055) early translation before the recensional amendments of ’Gos lhas btsas (ca. 1050). Under such circumstances, the central premises of classic Lachmannian stemmatics do not pertain, even if other useful results can still be derived from less ambitious stemmatic analysis.
Further complications arise due to the well-known historical fluidity of the Indian Buddhist scriptures themselves, before translation into Tibetan. Jonathan Silk, for example, argues that they never had a unique compositional kernel, nor were ever subjected to a unique redactorial moment, but on the contrary, continued to change and grow organically throughout their history. Under such circumstances, where the very notion of an original work is negated, what could stemmatics hope to recover? Silk suggests we loosen our fixation on quests for original works, and instead adopt the editorial methods developed by Peter Schäfer for medieval rabbinic literature, which, quite unlike the Masoretic Bible, is highly diffuse.
Naturally, we have to ask how such limitations on stemmatics might apply to the Ancient Tantra Collection texts. Are their traditions open or closed? Do they derive from multiple translations of possibly varying originals? Did they ever have a unique compositional kernel, or a unique redactorial moment? Our previous editions of Ancient Tantra Collection texts were intended, amongst other things, to test the experimental hypothesis that since many of them were Tibetan-made compilations of largely Indic fragments, some might have had an identifiable moment of redaction or compilation, and therefore need not be irrevocably diffuse in their origins, even if they might have become so in their subsequent transmission. Prior to our new edition of the Thabs zhags) root tantra, we had edited three Ancient Tantra Collection texts, and despite their considerable corruption, and the sometimes very considerable differences between their different witnesses, we did not find in these cases much evidence that cannot be most easily explained as the outcome of transmissional error and attempts to correct it, as well as some cases of editorial intervention to standardize spellings of mantras and so forth. One text even seemed partially amenable to stemmatic reconstruction, although bifidity stymied stemmatic analysis for the other two. With all three of these important Rnying ma tantras, after attempting to account carefully for the causes of every individual textual error or variation found within their different versions, we therefore felt we were most likely dealing with texts formed in an identifiable initial redactorial moment. But these texts were also in many places demonstrably compiled from pre-existent parts, to the extent that all of them actually shared some similar text passages at various points. It is entirely possible some such pre-existent parts were already replete with orthographic and other errors before incorporation into their new locations. One of the tantras perhaps gave a greater sense of coherent redactorial vision than the other two. A further still unexplored feature in early Rnying ma tantrism is evidence suggesting that the same or very similar text titles might have served as the basis for quite separate compositions at different occasions, so that several quite different texts bearing the same or almost the same title seem to have been in circulation. However, bearing the same title is of course not the same thing as being a variant version of the same composition. While the issue about titles still needs more research, what we can already say with reasonable certainty is that all the three texts we studied diverged over time, and we reiterated our earlier proposal that the divergences such texts have acquired over the last thousand years are in many cases no longer resolvable into a single “correct” text – at least not within a traditional framework. A further complication is that an “original” text recovered philologically might well incorporate “incorrect” features or incoherencies, since, as we have found, these texts were compiled from pre-existing parts that were quite likely not in themselves error-free. In short, the most “correct” text is not necessarily the historically earliest or even the archetype. Unsurprisingly, our philological analysis shows that the learned redactors of the Sde dge xylograph on several occasions “corrected” problematic readings quite likely inherited from original redactorial moments, most notably mantras. Textual mutability has de facto become accepted and accommodated as an inherent feature of Rnying ma tantric culture, even if reference is still made towards the ideal of a more unitary and more perfect tradition.
The situation has now developed with a further Ancient Tantra Collection scripture we are currently editing, called in its fullest title, A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis (’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padma ’phreng gi don bsdus pa, from this point given the short title, Thabs zhags), which is rare in having a surviving word-by-word commentary. The different extant versions of this tantra can vary quite dramatically, underlining how prominently textual variation figures within the literary culture of the Ancient Tantra Collection. We cannot absolutely conclude if its tradition was open or closed, if it descended from multiple translations that later intermingled or if it descended from a single redactorial moment, although the latter would seem much more likely. What we have found however is that in most of its more prestigious surviving editions (even though not in some more obscure peripheral versions), this scripture descended in a strikingly fluid relationship with its own commentary, which has been a major cause of the very high degree of variation between its surviving versions today. Here, we describe the transmission of this text, and explore some of the causes and circumstances of its variability.
New Evidence from the Thabs zhags
The Thabs zhags is considered a key scripture by the Rnying ma pa, located within a special and particularly esteemed doxographical section of the Ancient Tantra Collections known as the Eighteen Tantras of Mahāyoga (Ma hā yo ga’i rgyud sde bco brgyad). Its commentary displays some signs of possible authorship in Tibet: in chapter six, it glosses the Tibetan equivalent word for maṇḍala, dkyil ’khor, in terms of the two parts of the Tibetan word, giving first an explanation of center (dkyil), followed by an elaboration of the term, circle (’khor). But the core verses of the root text do not appear Tibetan in any such obvious way, and the title was accepted as an authentic Ancient Tradition scripture in the text lists of two early Sa skya masters. Grags pa rgyal mtshan (1147-1216) included it as one of only six Rnying ma scriptures in his tantra catalogue, and his great-nephew Chos rgyal ’phags pa’s (1235-1280) catalogue of 1273 followed likewise. From there, it found its way into those Bka’ ’gyur editions of the Tshal pa branch that have a special Ancient Tantra section, and also into at least two independent Bka’ ’gyur collections. However, the famous fourteenth-century compiler of the Bka’ ’gyur, Bu ston (1290-1364), did not endorse it as a valid translation from Sanskrit, and it does not occur in the Bka’ ’gyurs of the Them spangs ma branch of descent,which do not have Ancient Tantra sections. The Bka’ ’gyur traditions, then, were not in agreement, and we remain uncertain about its original provenance.
This text is extremely interesting for several reasons. It is one of only two full-length, complete Ancient Tantra Collection scriptures found at Dunhuang, the other being the Guhyasamāja, which is a text far more used by the Gsar ma pa than the Rnying ma pa, who, de facto, rarely practice Guhyasamāja traditions, even while having it in the Ancient Tantra Collection. The Thabs zhags is furthermore one of the very few Ancient Tantra Collection scriptures anywhere to have its own word-by-word commentary. This commentary survived at Dunhuang, and in fact the Dunhuang version of the root tantra comes embedded within the commentary, in the form of lemmata. Yet the commentary was seemingly ignored or even forgotten by the later Rnying ma tradition. Despite the fact that a somewhat corrupt partial version of it survives in three Bstan ’gyur editions, it does not seem to have had any significant presence in Rnying ma collections such as the Transmitted Teachings of the Nyingma Tradition (Rnying ma bka’ ma), and none of the highly learned Rnying ma bla mas we showed it to seems to have had any prior knowledge of its existence. We have found traditional citations from the Thabs zhags commentary in the works of Rong zom chos kyi bzang po and of Klong chen pa. They cite different passages, both from chapter two, which deals with the samayas. Rong zom pa’s citation is almost verbatim from the commentary, with some words omitted, while Klong chen pa seems to paraphrase a number of points made in the commentary. In both cases, they simply note that the citation is from the Thabs zhags, without specifying that it comes from the commentary rather than the root text. Such historically early non-differentiation between root text (mūla) and commentary might be of interest, in the light of our discussion below.
Contents of the Thabs zhags and Their Historical Interest
The contents of this text amply demonstrate how interesting and worthy of editing such texts can be. We have recently completed a preliminary translation of both root tantra and commentary, but since we are dealing with the doctrines and historical implications in greater detail elsewhere, we only briefly review them here.
The root text and commentary together present a complex Mahāyoga doctrine that arguably equals the contemporary Rnying ma tradition in sophistication and complexity. They teach a classic Rnying ma pa Mahāyoga doctrine of evenness, or sameness (mnyam pa nyid), reminiscent of the famous Secret Essence Tantra (Rgyud gsang ba snying po). Vairocana, the other five family Buddhas, with their consorts and retinues of bodhisattvas, make up the peaceful deities. The central male deity of the wrathful maṇḍala is a form of Śrī Heruka with nine heads and eighteen arms, surrounded by the Ten Wrathful Deities, or Khro bo bcu. The central female is the great fearsome female deity (’Jigs byed chen mo), specified in the commentary as Ral gcig ma (Ekajaṭā), still the main ma mo, or wrathful female deity, of the Rnying ma pantheon. These main deities are surrounded by a large entourage of emanations whose names, ordering, and attributes remain very similar in some transmitted Rnying ma texts, including some modern liturgical texts. In addition, the tantra teaches a wide range of ostensibly more pragmatic rituals, yet it packages them in a framework which comprehensively internalizes them, conspicuously turning them towards an exclusively soteriological purpose and orientation. It achieves this by an interpretation of Mahāyoga ritual that might be seen as anticipating Klong chen pa’s Rdzogs chen-oriented interpretations of the fundamental Mahāyoga tantra, the Secret Essence Tantra, in his famous Phyogs bcu’i mun sel commentary. The Thabs zhags commentary also includes numerous citations from other named tantric texts, some of whose titles correspond to famous scriptures of the Eighteen Tantras of Mahāyoga. However, we have not located the quoted passages in the extant scriptures of the same names, and it appears that they may not be intended as exact citations in any case.
The marginal annotations to the Dunhuang manuscript version of the commentary are extremely valuable, existing nowhere else, since the Bstan ’gyur versions did not reproduce them. They mention Śāntigarbha and several times speak of Sambhava or Padmasambhava, but in enigmatic terms. Other scholars, following Eastman’s short discussion of this text in the 1980s,28 have assumed they represent Padmasambhava as author of the commentary. In fact, the manuscript has no clear cut colophon at all, beyond giving a scribe’s name. What it does finish with is an enigmatic annotated homage that is not unambiguously identifiable as a colophon, together with a marginal note, which seems, if anything, perhaps just as likely to point to Padmasambhava as the source of the root tantra, possibly with Śāntigarbha as author of the commentary. However, we have identified a closely parallel verse to the main text’s homage in Nyang ral nyi ma ’od zer’s (1124-1192) Padmasambhava hagiography, the Zangs gling ma, and it now seems clear that the commentary’s main text does indeed conclude with a devotional praise to Padmasambhava.30 This may help to shed light on the pre-history of the Rnying ma tradition, with a Tantric scripture associated with Padmasambhava from the tenth century or perhaps even earlier; the dating of Dunhuang texts remains too primitive to permit real certainty. The commentary does employsome of the doctrinaltechnicaltermsassociatedwith anothergenuinely very early text associated with Padmasambhava, the Instructions on the Garland of Views (Man ngag lta ’phreng), but in several other respects shows a different doctrinal orientation. Śāntigarbha, a contemporary of Padmasambhava, was an Indian master well known from early sources, and particularly associated with Yogatantra texts. In Bu ston’s writings, he is given as a translator of the Total Purification of All Evil Existences, the King of Splendour (Ngan song thams cad yongs su sbyong ba gzi brjid kyi rgyal po’i brtag pa, Sarva-durgati-pariśodhanatejorājasya-kalpa). The ’Phang thang ma claims he performed the consecration rituals for Bsam yas. Śāntigarbha continues to play an important role alongside Padmasambhava in later Rnying ma literature as one of the so-called Eight Vidyādharas of India, whom the Rnying ma pa revere as important founders of their Mahāyoga tradition, and several of whom figure quite visibly in the Dunhuang literature.
In short, this old manuscript adds considerable weight to the evidence for substantial representativesof what we now call Rnying ma Mahāyoga being already present before the Dunhuang caves were closed. But such continuity is hardly surprising, since the Thabs zhags root text itself still exists within the Ancient Tantra Collection, and wascited as a source by various Rnying ma authorities over the centuries; most of the commentary still survives in the Bstan ’gyur, even if somewhat ignored.
The Thabs zhags transmission in Tibet comprises two parts: the transmission of the root scripture, and the transmission of the commentary. To understand the transmission of the Thabs zhags in Tibet, we must consider that while the root tantra probably did originally exist as a stand alone text, this stand alone version seems to have been displaced very early on by another work in which the root text came embedded in its commentary. We now know from stemmatic analysis that the ancient stand-alone version did in fact leave traces within various marginal editions in the extreme west, east and south of the Tibetan cultural regions. However, by the time the Tshal pa Bka’ ’gyur and the some of the Rnying ma pa canonical editions were being compiled, this stand-alone version seems to have been lost to view. At least, we can certainly see that on separate occasions, canonical compilers both Rnying ma and Gsar ma felt forced to attempt their own independent efforts at re-extracting the root text from the commentary, and in doing so, came to rather different conclusions about what was commentary and what was root. In this paper, we will briefly describe the transmission of the commentary, and then focus on these prestigious and influential canonical editions of the root text, the ones that were and still are used by most Tibetan readers, and reflect on the different decisions their editors made about the boundaries of the root text.
The commentary survives in only two sources: the Dunhuang manuscript and a truncated version in the three Bstan ’gyur editions of Peking, Snar thang, and Dga’ ldan. The Bstan ’gyur versions derive from a single ancestor, as evidenced in numerous shared indicative errors, including the omission of all text from the middle of chapter six until the end of chapter ten; and from the middle of chapter thirteen until the end of chapter seventeen: altogether over 30 percent of the total text. Without the Dunhuang text, these missing parts would not be recoverable. Conversely, some much smaller but still significant omissions in the Dunhuang text can be recovered from the Bstan ’gyur. The transmission of the root scripture is more complex. It descends in five extant branches, each clearly distinguished by their sharing of unique indicative errors and other features, and in two further Independent Bka’ ’gyur manuscripts, both of which share important features with the fifth branch, but not its indicative errors.
1. Firstly, there are the lemmata within the Dunhuang manuscript.
2. Secondly, there are the lemmata from the Bstan ’gyur commentary.
3. Thirdly, several Bka’ ’gyurs from the Tshal pa line carry the root text intheir Ancient Tantra sections. The version in the Sde dge xylograph Ancient Tantra Collection must also be considered part of this Bka’ ’gyur branch, since it must have been prepared using publisher’s proofs (par yig) made from the same blocks as the slightly earlier Sde dge xylograph Bka’ ’gyur, with little more than the pagination varying.
4. Fourthly, there is a version witnessed by all four available BhutaneseAncient Tantra Collection manuscripts, namely Mtshams brag, Sgang steng-a, Sgang steng-b, and Sgra med rtse.
5. Fifthly, there is a version witnessed by the South Central Tibetan AncientTantra Collection manuscript editions of Gting skyes, Rig ’dzin, and Kathmandu (we have not been able to check the Nubri manuscript of this grouping, since the relevant folios are missing).38
6. Finally, thanks to our colleagues Helmut Eimer, Helmut Tauscher, andBruno Lainé, who have generously shared unpublished photographs with us, we now know that further witnesses of the text are also found in the two Independent Bka’ ’gyurs of ’Ba’ thang and Hemis, and these witnesses share the textual tradition of the South Central version, but they each have their own unique indicative errors.
These five versions of the root text differ from each other, sometimes radically.
At first glance, one might imagine the variation to result from an open tradition, like those Bka’ ’gyur texts where different Tibetan translations, sometimes also deriving from differing Sanskrit sources, had descended separately and then interacted within Tibet. If the Dunhuang finds had never been recovered, this is quite possibly the kind of conclusion philologists might have come to for the Thabs zhags.
But on closer inspection, the evidence actually indicates otherwise. Differences between the two versions of the commentary can all be explained by transmissional error causing loss or corruption of text in one or the other version. Striking variations in the root text appear to have been generated from confusion as to which words of the commentary were lemmata, and which words were commentary. We believe the South Central Tibetan Ancient Tantra Collection grouping, with the two independent Bka’ ’gyurs of ’Ba’ thang and Hemis, preserve the original boundaries of the stand-alone root text. However, the historically much more influential Tshal pa Bka’ ’gyur and Bhutanese editions of the root text do not descend from the original stand-alone root text: they descend from the commentary, and on different occasions, took quite different and mutually varying decisions about what were lemmata of the root text and what was commentary. So even though our textual analysis may not be able irrevocably to exclude all other possibilities, including an open tradition, nevertheless it is undeniable that a major factor in the social transmission of this tantra over the last ten centuries has been its fuzzy boundaries with its own commentary within its most widely used editions.
There are parts of the commentary where all the lemmata are made perfectly clear by the structure or wording of the text. For example, most chapters commence with a clearly framed four line verse of root text. Often, words of the root text may be signaled by wording, such as zhes gsungs te (it is said). However, there are large sections where the root text is not explicitly marked off in this way.
The Dunhuang scribes clearly understood the importance of distinguishing root text from commentary. In the Dunhuang manuscript, lemmata are often highlighted with a semi-transparent wash sometimes found in Indian and Tibetan manuscripts that is similar to the idea of modern highlighting ink. Unfortunately, it seems not to have been applied completely or consistently, leaving major ambiguities. We cannot know how far other ancient manuscripts might have applied such marking, and there is no evidence for it in the modern Bstan ’gyur versions. However, it does enable us to see how the scribe of the Dunhuang manuscript understood the boundaries of the root and commentary, at least for large sections of the text. And it is striking that a good deal of text that occurs in some or all of our various root texts, is neither indicated as root text in the Dunhuang manuscript by wording or by highlighting.
To consider one example (see the Transcription Section), parallel diplomatic transcriptions of part of chapter eleven from: [1] the Dunhuang manuscript; [2] the South-Central Tibetan manuscripts; [3] the Bhutanese manuscript tradition; [4] the Bka’ ’gyur Tradition (as represented here simply by D/Dk). See also the British Library’s digital images of the relevant folios (folios 42r-43r, 44v-45r, at http://idp.bl.uk/database/oo_loader.a4d?pm=IOL%20Tib%20J%20321), on which the highlighting is clear.
IOL Tib J 321, folios 41v-42r. IOL Tib J 321, folios 42v-43r.
Reproduced by kind permission of The British Reproduced by kind permission of The British Library. Library.
IOL Tib J 321, folios 43v-44r. IOL Tib J 321, folios 44v-45r. - Reproduced by kind permission of The British Reproduced by kind permission of The British Library.
Firstly, if one looks at this passage in the Dunhuang manuscript, it can be seen that the mantras alone have been selected for highlighting, most probably indicating that they alone constitute root text. Then, if you look at Transcription B, you will see that more than five hundred years later, the South Central Tibetan and the ’Ba’ thang independent Bka’ ’gyur editions still agree with this assessment (the passage is unfortunately lost through folio loss in the Hemis independent Bka’ ’gyur), reproducing as root text only what the Dunhuang manuscript has highlighted. The Bhutanese editions on Transcription C have mainly agreed with this assessment, but have also added the list of eight zoomorphic goddesses found lower down in the commentary (for convenience, we have underlined them in the Dunhuang manuscript transcription). By contrast, the Bka’ ’gyur versions in Transcription D disagree entirely: in this section they take every single word given in the commentary as root text.
What has happened here? We know from stemmatic analysis that the South Central and Independent Bka’ ’gyur traditions alone remain faithful to an ancient and correct tradition as represented in this case in the Dunhuang manuscript through its highlighting, while the Bka’ ’gyur tradition has mistakenly allowed a lot of commentarial passages to intrude into the root text. But in fact, there are powerful apparent justifications for the Bka’ ’gyur reading. The text at this point appears seemlessly to continue the reported conversation begun at the beginning of the chapter, between Vajrasattva, as teacher of the tantra and Vajrapaṇi, as interlocutor. In other words, unlike much of the commentary, it takes the literary form of root text, the actual speech acts of the Buddhas, rather than the commentarial utterances of a human voice. But this raises further questions, because elsewhere in the text, Vajrasattva is the interlocutor, and Vairocana the expounder: might this section then be an interpolation from another tantra? Yet that need not be the case, since Vajrapaṇi and the Eight Bodhisattvas are undoubtedly part of the maṇḍala, so that Vajrasattva could quite convincingly be explained as addressing his explanation to Vajrapaṇi in the implied capacity of intermediary to Vairocana. Thus the question remained for the Bka’ ’gyur editors, does the passage count as commentary, or is it intended as an integral part of the root text? The text here describes and comments on the effectiveness of the female deities who are listed in the first part of the chapter, and whose mantras are now given. The phrasing of the additional text correctly omitted in the South Central, ’Ba’ thang, and Bhutanese versions could from appearancesalone perfectlywell be eitherroot text or commentarialmeditative instruction. It is almost impossible to adjudicate between the different readings without stemmatic analysis.
Perhaps Tibetan editors found it additionally hard to know the answers to these questions, because the literary conventions separating Buddhist root tantras from their commentaries are not always rigorously observed. A root tantra text passage can sometimes look like commentary, and vice versa. Moreover, within a tantra, interlocutors and expounders can change (we find this for example within the Phur pa bcu gnyis), and there is no inherent reason why a divine figure who is an interlocutor at one juncture cannot become an expounder at another.
If the Dunhuang manuscript is anything to go by, it is quite likely that the Tshal pa Bka’ ’gyur and Bhutanese Ancient Tantra Collection editors were not much helped by the layout of the commentary witnesses they were working from. Albeit rarely, we can sometimes feel confident that the Dunhuang manuscript’s highlighting technique does identify commentary intruding into the root text. The opening root text citation in both chapters seven and eight contains a single line explaining that Vajrasattva is being addressed. This line in each opening verse is un-highlighted in the Dunhuang manuscript, but it occurs (mistakenly) in the Bka’ ’gyur version of the root text. Unfortunately, most occasions where we have apparent disagreement, often over extensive passages, are not so easily resolved. The Dunhuang manuscript does not highlight any of the text within the penultimate chapter forty-one, which some versions count as the first part of the final chapter.
The Bhutanese Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa version appears largely to accept this assessment, jumping from the chapter’s opening words to the content of chapter forty-two, which in some versions is not a separate chapter. Yet the Bka’ ’gyur version includes every word of chapter forty-one of the commentarial text, while only only the South Central Ancient Tantra Collection and two Independent Bka’ ’gyurs correctly show only a few lines from it. In this instance, the text actually looks much more like commentary, suggesting a good case for the Bhutanese decision, although the specific lines given in the South Central Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa and the Independent Bka’ ’gyurs make good sense as root text and are actually correct. Again, there is no easy or obvious way of adjudicating such a case without stemmatics. In this paper, we have examined only one specimen boundary difference: in fact, the extant versions of the root text all display different and unique boundary choices in various places, showing that the definition of the root texts’ boundaries has been quite undecided over the last one thousand years. At least five different decisions about it survive in the extant literature, and we have no idea how many others might have existed in the past.
Perhaps we have little option but to allow, as do Tibetan bla mas with some reluctance in actual social practice, that the root text of the Thabs zhags has taken several widely differing forms, most of them equally defensible on purely semantic grounds. Despite the probable unitary origins of the text in a single archetype, undoubtedly, the boundaries between the root text and the commentary have proven fuzzy for a thousand years or more. If we accept the possible interpretation that the root text was originally seen as the teachings of Padmasambhava, a fully enlightened being in human form who resembles the later Rnying ma treasure revealers by being able to produce both scripture and commentary alike, then it looks harder still to fix the fuzzy boundaries without the benefit of stemmatics. The text of the Thabs zhags root tantra remains singularly difficult to separate from its commentary to this day and probably would have always remained so, without the benefit of modern stemmatic analysis.
Concluding Reflections
In previous studies, we have looked at how what may seem significant variation to modern Western eyes, is tolerated in different editions of Rnying ma tantric texts. For example, we looked at the development of the Bdud ’joms gter gsar sngon ’gro text, from Bdud ’joms gling pa’s (1835-1904) earlier version to that of the second Bdud ’joms sprul sku, ’Jigs bral ye shes rdo rje (1904-1987). Some years ago, we looked at two variants within the Vajrakīlaya root verses, perhaps transmissionally generated, both of which have attracted an immense degree of commentarial exegesis over the centuries from many great masters. Thus the Thabs zhags reminds us once again that beyond technical questions of open or closed transmissions, a major desideratum for Rnying ma textual scholars is further investigation into its culture of seemingly tolerated textual variation – a topic not so far sufficiently explored.
Institutionally speaking, Rnying ma tantric culture was a world of shifting decentralized religious authority, where no single body could establish a text definitive for all. Moreover, textual reproduction through manuscript copies dominated over print culture. Sde dge’s late eighteenth century xylographic edition was the only Ancient Tantra Collection ever printed, and as has often proven to be the case with Tibetan literature, the impact of its printing in any case did little to reduce the variation between editions. In common with much traditional Buddhist scholasticism, it was also a world characterized by prodigious feats of memory, resulting in complex ongoing interactionsbetween written and memorized versions of texts, the dynamics of which so far remain little analyzed by international scholarship. More importantly, as with the rest of Tibetan Buddhism and so typically of many pre-modern cultures, the literary ideal was usually not to author brilliant entirely original ideas in the modern post-renaissance sense – that would be decried as mere individualistic contrivance (rang bzo). Rather, the idea was faithfully to pass on existing understandings, often by preserving received text verbatim. In short, a common ideal was not the “author” as we modernists know it, but something more akin to the figure of the “tradent” that has been so brilliant analyzed in recent Talmudic scholarship. In such a world of de facto ongoing collectiveauthorship, existing fragments or building blocks of holy dharma, blessed through their usage by many previous generations of masters, are typically re-inflected, re-anthologized, and rearranged by learned bla mas to suit the needs of their contemporary audiences. This has two implications: firstly, the notion of an individual creative author as we have it does not always apply very well – the notion of tradent as part of a collective enterprise descending through the generations often fits better. Secondly, the notion of a fixed text was not strictly envisaged in all cases: as Jonathan Silk and Paul Harrison have pointed out for India, some genres of Tibetan literature in a very real sense included an aspect of collective works in endless progress.
the scribe knew exactly how many instances of each word and letter should occur in each paragraph. Conversely, as modern textual critics like Jerome McGann have shown, literary works that are far more recent than the Masoretic text and which only emerged in the age of print, can vary considerably, for a wide variety of reasons. Hence we must conclude that the unyielding ideological determination of generations of Jews to keep their Torah absolutely free of variation or error proved more significant than any limitations of the manuscript medium; while the lack of such determination has allowed some modern printed literary works, such as Byron’s The Giaour, to vary greatly from the outset (J. J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism [[[Wikipedia:Chicago|Chicago]]: University of Chicago Press, 1983], 31-2, 59ff, 105-106). The same has been true of Rnying ma block prints and other printings of religious liturgies in recent history: significant textual variations between different printed versions of the same popular practice texts are rife in Bhutanese and Tibetan monasteries in India. The mere fact of printing has failed to eradicate variation or make such Rnying ma texts uniform. Thus we can see that in pursuit of uniformity, ideological commitment clearly trumps technology. One of our major theoretical points is that a Masoretic Jewish-type absolute commitment to accuracy at any cost has not been evidenced in the Ancient Tantra Collection tradition, nor generally in Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna Buddhism – otherwise, as we know from the Jewish example, complete uniformity could technically have been achieved, even before the advent of print. Nor were techniques for textual uniformity similar to the Masoretic ones unknown in India and Tibet – far from it – the stability of the Paninian and Tibetan syllabaries encouraged the development of methods of alphabetic calculation,so that we find comparable methods routinely applied with complete success in coded mantra tables (mantroddhāra, sngags btu ba; see note 52 below). These served to protect the exact spelling of mantras over many centuries against any possible transmissionally generated variation. There was probably nothing other than the lack of overwhelming ideological commitment to prevent suchlike or other even more compact and simple techniques of alphabetic and verbal calculation being applied to the entirety of Buddhist texts, beyond the mantras. Perhaps the very words of the traditional Buddhist nidāna – “Thus have I heard: at one time...” – leaves open some possibility that someone else heard something slightly different regarding another occasion when the Buddha taught. Such pervasive features of Tibetan literary culture remain desperately under-studied, and we are scheduled to make further investigations into them in the near future. From what little is understood so far, it seems that the parameters of process and change might differ between genres. In Gter ma, textual variation often accumulates over time through the complex yet often visible interactions of identifiable authors, governed by strict cultural norms. For example, our recent work on the Immortal Life’s Creative Seed (’Chi med srog thig) and other texts within the Bdud ’joms corpus shows how named bla mas edit, revise, remix and republish the revelations of previous gter stons, or else adapt previous revelations into a newer revelation. Yet in the Ancient Tantra Collection, variation more often takes the form of a mute inscrutable anonymous inheritance from the distant past. Our present question is, how might we begin to approach Rnying ma understandings of variation specifically in the Thabs zhags and in the wider Ancient Tantra Collection?
First, we must review what data we have – which of course is still small, since most of the Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa remains unread. However, we do know that the Sde dge Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa, the only surviving Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa redaction that was able to consult several geographicallydiverse editions, carefullyreproduces good alternative readings in its marginal notes (see note 10). Taking this further,
the effect of bringing the group of deities in the retinue into line with Bdud ’joms rin po che’s own version of Bdud ’joms gling pa’s revelation. A line which in Bdud ’joms gling pa’s text referred to the four families of the Sras mchog kīlas (sras mchog kī la rigs bzhi’i thugs dam bskang:, Bdud ’joms gling pa, Padma’i rnam rol bdud ’joms gling pa’i skor nye brgyud zab gter chos mdzod rin po che, ed. H. H. Bdud-’joms ’jigs-bral-ye-ses-rdo-rje [[[Kalimpong]]: Dupjung Lama], ca:126), has been amended to five families (sras mchog kī la rigs lnga’i thugs dam bskang:, Bdud ’joms rin po che, ’Jigs bral ye shes rdo rje, The Collected Writings and Revelations of H. H. bDud-’joms Rin-po-che ’Jigs bral ye shes rdo rje, vol. tha [[[Kalimpong]]: Dupjung Lama, 1979-1985], 160). the Sde dge edition of the Phur pa bcu gnyis even preserves quite variant readings for the entire extended set of Vajrakīlaya mantras within this single text – one set given in a mantra list, the other a corrupt and inconsistent phonetical rendition encoded in a mantra table - with a marginal note explicitly drawing attention to the editorial decision to leave the mantra table unedited, even though it had been scrutinized. Thirdly, the two main variant renderings of the Vajrakīlaya root verses, quite probably originally the result of accidental transmissional variation, have over the centuries each generated prodigious quantities of prestigious commentarial text – so that to reduce this variation to a single “correct” version in modern times has become unthinkable (see notes 2 and 46). Above all, we find the constant and ubiquitous repetition, within Ancient Tantra Collection scriptures, of passages of text across the spectrum of being exactly the same (barring transmissional variants), of remaining close but showing recensional variation, or differing through more creative rearrangement. This is abundant evidence that both verbatim reproduction and variations on an existing theme were de riguer for the anonymous compilers of these texts (see note 49). What does this imply?
Our impression gained from textual studies is that the bla mas’ response to apparently equally good but variant readings in their Ancient Tantra Collection scriptures implicitly resembles the ideas of many modern anthropologists who see knowledge or culture as distributive. In other words, Rnying ma pa bla mas, although they would prefer a less varied tradition, de facto operate on the basis that no single extant form of words from the Ancient Tantra Collectionis necessarily uniquely complete and valid. In this view, a definitive version, vast in length and perfect in every detail, persists eternally in the Tantric pure realms, but unfortunately, no longer earth. Instead, pragmatically, they accept that the remaining available terrestrial sources are varied and distributed, each nevertheless potentially having a valid partial contribution to make to the total picture.
This is very close to many modern anthropological formulations. In the words of Roger Keesing, a distributive model of culture takes as fundamental the distribution of partial versions of a cultural tradition among members of a society…[it] must take into account both diversity and commonality… “A Culture” is therefore seen as a pool of knowledge to which individuals contribute in different ways and degrees. A more recent presentation of the distributive nature of knowledge comes from Fredrik Barth, based on examples taken from New Guinea, Bali, and England, but it seems written while he was staying in Bhutan. Barth analytically distinguishes three faces or aspects of knowledge. First, any tradition of knowledge must contain a corpus of substantive assertions and ideas about aspects of the world. Secondly, it must be instantiated and communicated in one or several media as a series of partial representations in the form of words, symbols, gestures, or actions. Thirdly, it will be distributed, communicated, employed, and transmitted within a series of instituted social relations.55
Barth’s exposition of a distributive model is underlined in his insistence that the three faces of knowledge appear only in their particular applications, and not as a generalized abstract entity. We believe that such a distributive model corresponds quite closely to one important aspect of how Rnying ma pa bla mas work in practice with the transmission of their Ancient Tantra Collection. By understanding their distributive mode of operation, we also understand how they tolerate such wide discrepancy of good readings in their canonical sources without excessive dismay or alarm (bad readings are of course rejected by all as scribal error).
To adapt Barth’s model to our purposes, we can say that knowledge of the Ancient Tantra Collection in Tibet had three aspects: The first aspect is the actual substantive teachings and doctrines of the Ancient Tantra Collection: By acknowledging the importance of these, one avoids the absurdity of an extreme relativism, which would say that the Rnying ma tantric tradition is really just whatever anyone claims it to be. In the parlance of the bla mas, this aspect is symbolically represented by the widespread idea of the complete and perfect versions of the tantras eternally preserved in transcendent locations such as pure lands, which uniquely represent the complete and full authorial intention of the Buddhas. The second aspect is each of the numerous and varying manuscript and xylograph witnesses within which the Ancient Tantra Collection has been represented in history, such as the South Central Tibetan text from Gting skyes, or the Sde dge xylograph. By acknowledging their occasional diversity of good readings, and accepting their particular differences, one avoids the extreme of positing a monolithic textual uniformity which, as the bla mas are well aware, does not exist.
The third aspect is the instituted social relations through which the Ancient Tantra Collection is transmitted, taught and reproduced. By acknowledging this, one accepts that the tradition is inseparable from its human performance, and thus we counteract the latent tendency of textual scholarship to abstract its materials away from actual historical realities. In the parlance of the bla mas, this corresponds to their notions of transmission through exalted lineages of enlightened gurus to worthy disciples, sponsored by virtuous donors. [For many students, direct involvement in the texts might be limited to the receipt of their ritual transmissions, or occasional public readings for the purpose of making merit and conferring blessings. Their direct study was an elite activity, while general familiarization with Ancient Tantra Collection materials would be effected through the incorporation of some sections into liturgical practice, and through the medium of commentarial presentation.]
As Barth suggests, these three aspects mutually determine each other, but should not be envisaged as an abstract unity with three parts. Rather, they appear in the particulars of action in every event of the application, performance and transmission of knowledge of the Ancient Tantra Collection. They mutually interact and determine each other as particulars, in numerous moments distributed through time and space, and it is these particular events that constitute the actual transmissions of the Ancient Tantra Collection.
Hence the editorial decisions made in any specific redaction of the Thabs zhags has depended on the mutually determining factors of what doctrines the Thabs zhags is teaching, the readings of the available exemplars or ma dpe, and on how the presiding editors on that occasion, ideally supported by their supernatural cognitions, attempted to ensure the new text’s accordance with the eternal doctrines. In short, there is no single monolithic or abstract entity that we can call The Transmission of the Thabs zhags, or of the Ancient Tantra Collection. Rather, their transmission is distributed, instantiated in numerous separate events through time and space that have their own dynamic and individuality. In this way, the range of good readings of the different editions of the Ancient Tantra Collection do not as far as we can see cause agony to the bla mas simply because they might vary somewhat. A comfortable degree of latitude, within which variation can be tolerated while still upholding the overall purity of the scriptural tradition, is gained in the endless mutually determining interplay of the three factors we have outlined above.
The Rnying ma pa’s de facto distributive mode of operation over the last many centuries implies that even if the recovery of a strictly historical single earliest text is the Holy Grail for philology, it perhaps has somewhat less absolute significance for them, unless they are to now embrace modern text critical criteria. Combining pragmatic acceptance of the status quo with mystical idealism, they tacitly acknowledge that over time, ongoing repairs to scribal errors can cause texts topresent varying good readings, but their response is almost as much transcendental as historical. To put that another way, it considerably depends on the religious authority of their great bla ma-editors, who, if realized and learned beings, must have some degree of direct access to the perfect original meanings of the tantras, and who, if gter stons, can even act like Padmasambhava as fountainheads or mediumsfornewBuddhavacana,overandabovemerelearnedediting.Butreligious authority in the Rnying ma pa has never been centralized, and on different occasions, the editorial decisions of different realized and omniscient bla mas have taken mysteriously different turns, even when faced with exactly the same textual crux. This means that in different places at different times, a variety of divergent but semantically equally profound meanings could potentially be generated around a single textual crux; and because of the great expense of transporting huge Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa collections across large distances, such variant readings often became regional, and only rarely cross referenced with one another. The upshot is that we international scholars cannot and should not ignore themanytransmissionallyandrecensionallytransformedsemanticallygoodreadings within the Ancient Tantra Collection that have appeared through Tibetan history and across its regions. We know, for example, that the great ’Jam mgon kong sprul kept a copy of the Ancient Tantra Collection in his residence at Dpal spungs, and it also looks quite likely from their shared readings that it was the Sde dge xylograph edition he consulted. We also know that this Sde dge edition seems to reflect a distinctive East Tibetan tradition, but, unusually for Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa editions, also has some exposure to editions from distant regions, and is in addition full of recensional changes mainly attributed to famous late eighteenth century bla mas. From the point of view of stemmatics, this heavily redacted and conflated edition is far removed from any original archetype. From the point of view of living Tibetan Buddhism, and hence of functional Tibetological scholarship, its widely influential readings are crucial.
This partially transcendental and distributive mode of working, shaped by a shifting and decentralized religious authority, which we see as an important element in the transmission of the Ancient Tantra Collection, is thus considerably at variance to the strictly historical presuppositions of stemmatic analysis. Stemmatics developed in the West with reference to such cultural models as the monolithically uniform Masoretic Bible, and the notionally fixed and timeless utterances of individual Classical authors. With growing scholarly awareness of the fluidity of so many Buddhist texts through history, the relevance of stemmatics is sometimes called into question by contemporary Buddhist scholars, including some important voices within the major European centers of philology, who understand full well that its historicist premises do not fit Buddhist literature. We feel such a rejection can be overdone. We do recognize the grave limitations inherent in trying to force onto Buddhist literature a Lachmannian style of stemmatic method, with all its underlying presuppositions of textual uniformity. Nevertheless we believe we can use stemmaticsas a probing device, an analytic tool, to isolate not merely archetypes such as that of the Thabs zhags, but also particular versions of an otherwise fluid scriptural tradition at interesting junctures in its development and history: for example, we believe we might have enough evidence to reconstruct for many texts the Tibetan Lha lung hypearchetype from which all the current Bhutanese manuscripts of the Ancient Tantra Collection are descended, and we find this a potentially useful tool. So our approach preserves and combines two perspectives on textual editing otherwise seen as contradictory. On the one hand, there is the pioneer’s optimism of Helmut Eimer, whose initial vision was that the classic stemmatic methods of Paul Maas could yield dividends in Bka’ ’gyur analysis. On the other hand, there is the more pessimistic approach of some recent scholars, who suggest that in a universe of irreducible textual fluidity, the best we can hope for is the elimination of orthographic errors and other egregious transmissional accumulations. Our methodology, by contrast, accepts and even celebrates the ongoing permutations of these texts, but still finds value in stemmatic techniques as a way of recovering both their original archetypes and also significant moments in their history. In conclusion, we should add how delightful it would be if further Ancient Tantra Collection texts turn out to be genuinely amenable to stemmatic analysis, so that we can reconstruct more early readings from them, to aid our understanding of the doctrines and practices of the texts, and also historical investigations into the seemingly impossibly obscure period of Rnying ma origins. At the same time, it would be unfortunate if we were to lose ourselves in historically oriented researches and fail to recognize and explore the de facto distributive realities which constitutes the actual historical existence of the Ancient Tantra Collection in Tibet and beyond.
Transcription
A Commentary on the Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis (’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padma ’phreng gi don bsdus pa’i ’grel pa’) An extract from chapter eleven in the Dunhuang Manuscript IOL Tib J 321 42r-45r. Most scholars currently date this manuscript as not later than the mid-eleventh century. The text is available online at the International Dunhuang Project site: http://idp.bl.uk/database/ oo_loader.
Conventions:
1. Highlighted text (ཨཱ་ོཾ ) represents text highlighted in the original with a translucent yellow wash.
2. Bracketed location descriptions [below line 6] represent interlinear annotations in small writing.
3. Asterisks (***) represent spaces for string holes in the manuscript.
4. Light blue text with underline (ཅྀ་) represents additions.
5. Red text between vertical lines (|རུ་|) represents deletions.
6. Underlining (སིང་ཧ་མུ་ཁ་) is added for the reader’s convenience, to indicate the zoomorphic goddesses.
7. [Gt]: The Golden Bstan ’gyur (Gser gyi lag bris ma), produced between 1731-1741, currently held at Ganden Monastery; published in Tianjing 1988, digitally scanned for TBRC, New Delhi 2002. A CD version is available from the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, New York (W23702). The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo ’phreng gi don bsdus pa’i ’grel pa commentary is in volume Rgyud ’grel vol. bu (78), 243-321.
[panel 42r] [line 1] །ཤར་ཕྱོགས་ན་འཕྲ་མེན་མ་ཀོའུ་རེ་ཁ་དོག་སྔོན་མོ་། ཕྱག་གཉིས་པ་སྟེ། ཕྱག་གཡོན་པ་ཙན་དན་
[line 2] དམར་པོས་བཀང་བ་ཐོགས། གཡས་ཞིང་ཆུང་ངུ་འི་དབྱིག་པ་ཐོགས་པ་སྟ་ེ། ཨཱོཾ་བ་ཛྲ་ཀོའུ་ར་ིཛཱ་ཛཱ་ཧཱུཾ། ཞེས་སྟོང་རྩ་བརྒྱད་བཟླས་ཏ་ེབཅོལ་
[line 3] ན། །སངས་རྒྱས་ཀྱང་འགུགས་ན། *** །གཞན་ལྟ་སྨོས་ཀྱང་ཅི་དགོས་། ***** །ཆེ་གེ་མོ་ཞིག་ཅེས་བཅོལ་ལ་། ||ལུ་
[line 4] གཏོར་མ་དང་ཙན་དན་དམར་ཆེན་གྱི་ཨ་*****རྒ་ལ་། །ཨཱོཾ་རུ་ རུ་ལུ་ཧཱུཾ་བྷྱོ་། །ཞེས་བརྗོད་ཅངི ་། ཨ་རྒ་ལན་གསུམ་
[line 5] སྦྲེང་ང་ོ། ། ལྷོ་ཕྱོགས་ན་ཙེའུ་ར་ིཁ་དོག་སེར་མོ་། ཕྱག་ན་མདའ་གཞུ་འགེངས་པ། །ཨཱོཾ་བ་ཛྲ་ཙོའུ་རི་ཧཱུཾ་འཛཱ། ཞེས་སྟོང་རྩ་བརྒྱད་བཟླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་
[below line 5, continuing onto note below line 6] གདོན་དང་དགྲ་འི་གཟུགས་བྱས་ལ་མདའ་འི། བར་བཞག་གམ་གང་ལ་གདུག་པའི་ [line 6] ན། ཕྱག་ན་རྡ་ོརྗེ་འི་མཐུ་ཡང་། རྡུལ་ཙམ་ཡང་མྱེད་པར་རྐུ་ནུས་པ་ན་། ། གཞན་ལྟ་ སྨོས་ཀྱང་ཅི་དགོས་། །ནུབ་ཕྱོགས་ན་པྲ་མ་ོཧ་དམར་པ་།ོ [below line 6] ཕྱོགས་ཁ་བལྟས་ཏེ་མདའ་འཕངས་ཏེ་ཕོག་ཅིང་གཟིར་ལ་ལ་བདག་དུ་གི་དབང་དུ་འགྱུར་རོ།
[panel 42v] [line 1] ཕྱག་ན་ཆུ་[Gt 272] སྲིན་གྱི་རྒྱལ་མཚན་ཐགོ ས་པ། ཨཱོཾ་བ་ཛྲ་པྲ་མོ་ཧ་ཧཱུཾ་ཛ་ཛཱ་ཞེས་སྟོང་རྩ་བརྒྱད་བཟླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན། །ཕྱག་ན་རྡོ་རྗེ་ཡང་རང་གི་མཐུ་
[below line 1, on left] སྤྱི་བོར་ལ་བསྐོར་བར་བསམ། [below line 1, on right] ལྷ་དང་མྱི་ཡང་བདག་གི་དབང་དུ་འདུས་པར་བསྒོམ། [line 2] གཞག་ནས་དབང་དུ་འོང་ན་། །གཞན་ལྟ་ཅྀ་སྨསོ ་།60 །བྱང་ཕྱོགས་ན་བེ་ཏ་ལ་ིཁ་དོག་ནག་པོ། ཕྱག་གཡོན་ན་ཞིང་ཆུང་ངུ་འཛིན་ཟ་བ་།
[line 3] ཕྱག་གཡས་ན་རྡོ་རྗེ་ཕྱར། ཨཱོཾ་བ་ཛྲ་བེ་ཏ་*****ལི་ཧཱུཾ་ཛཱ་ཞེས་སྟོང་རྩ་བརྒྱད་བཟླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་། **** །འཇིག་རྟེན་དང་འཇགི ་རྟེན་ལས་འདས་
[line 4] པའི་དངོས་གྲུབ་ཐམས་ཅད་ཀྱང་གྲུབ་ན་******། །འཇིག་རྟེན་གྱི་བསྒྲུབ་པ་ཕྲན་ཚེགས་ལྟ་******ཅི་སྨོས་། །ཤར་ལྷོ་འི་མཚམས་ན་ [line 5] པུས་ཀ་སི་དམར་སེར་། །ཕྱག་གཉིས་ཞིང་ཆུང་ངུ་འི་བ་སུ་ཏ་འདྲེན་ཅིང་ཟ་བ། ཨཱོཾ་བ་ཛྲ་པུས་ཀ་སི་ཧཱུཾ་ཛཱ་། ཞེས་སྟོང་རྩ་བརྒྱད་བཟླས་ཏ་ེབཅོལ་
[line 6] ན་། ཕྱག་ན་རྡོ་རྗེ་ཡང་འཆིང་ཞིང་འདྲེན་པར་ནུས་ན་། གཞན་ཟ་བར་བྱ་བ་ལྟ་ཅི་སྨོས་། ། ལྷོ་ནུབ་ཀྱི་མཚམས་ན་། ཀས་མ་ལི་
[panel 43r]
[line 1] ༆། །ཁ་དོག་ལྗང་ཀུ་། ཕྱག་གཡོན་པ་ན་བན་ད་ཙན་དན་དམར་པོས་བཀང་སྟེ་རྡ་ོརྗེས་དཀྲུག་ཅིང་འཐུང་བ་། ཨཱོཾ་བ་ཛྲ་ཀས་མ་རི་ཧཱུཾ་ཛཱ་། །
[line 2] ཞེས་སྟོང་རྩ་བརྒྱད་བཟླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་། ཕྱག་ན་རྡོ་རྗེ་ཡང་མྱོས་པར་འགྱུར་ན་། གཞན་ལྟ་སྨོས་ཀྱང་ཅ་ིདགོས་། ནུབ་བྱང་མཚམས་ན་བཛྲ་ཀར་
[line 3] མ་ཁ་དོག་ལྗང་ཀུ། ཞིང་ཆུང་ངུ་ལག་པ་*****གཉིས་ཀྱིས་བཟུང་སྟ་ེསྙང་ཁ་ནས་ཟ་བ་། །ི ཨཱོཾ་བ་ཛྲ་ཀར་མ་ཧཱུ་ཾཛཱ་། ཞེས་སྟོང་རྩ་ [line 4] བརྒྱད་བཟླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་། ལས་གང་*****བྱ་བ་ཐམས་ཅད་འགྲུབ་བོ་། །བྱང་ཤར་*****གྱི་མཚམས་ན་། ཙན་ཏ་ལ་ིཁ་དོག་ [line 5] སེར་སྐྱ་ཕྱག་གཡས་ན་། ཞིང་ཆུང་ངུ་འི་བན་ད་འཛིན་། གཡོན་ཞིང་ཉིད་འཛིན་། ཨཱོཾ་བ་ཛྲ་ཙན་ད་ལི་ཧཱུཾ་ཛཱ་། ཞེས་སྟོང་རྩ་བརྒྱད་བཟླས་ཏེ་
[line 6] བཅོལ་ན་། ཟ་མ་[Gt 273] དང་མ་ནིང་ལ་ཡང་རྒྱུད་འཕེལ་བར་བྱེད་ན་། དབང་པོ་ཚང་ཞིང་ཉམས་པ་མྱེད་པ་། ཚེ་དང་དབང་ཐང་འཕེལ་བར་བྱ་བ་
[panel 43v]
[line 1] བྱ་བ་61ལྟ་ཅ་ིསྨོས་། །འཕྲ་མེན་མ་འདི་རྣམས་འཕྲིན་ལས་མཛད་པར་བསྐུལ་བའི་ཚེ། ཨ་རྒ་དང་གཏོར་མ་དབུལ་བ་ནི། གོང་དུ་སྨསོ ་པ་བཞིན་
[line 2] ཚུལ་བཞིན་བགྱི། པ། ཁྲོས་ན་ཐམས་ཅད་ཕྱག་ཆ་ཏྲིལ་ཤུ་|ལ|་འབར་བ་། གཡོན་[རྡེ?]འུ་ཅུང་བསྣམས། གདན་མྱེ་སྨུག་གནག་། །
[line 3] སྐུ་འི་ཁ་དོག་ནག་མོ་ལ་། ཁྲག་དང་*****ཞག་དང་ཐལ་བའི་ཐིག་ལསེ ་ཚུམ་བུར་བྱས་*****ཤིང་། བ་སུ་ཏས་རྐེད་པར་བཅིངས་།
[line 4] གསེར་ཀྱི་པགས་པ་གོས་སུ་བགོས། ***** །སྲོ་|ན|་ཏ་ཨན་ཛཱ་ནས་ལུས་བརྒྱན་ཏེ་། ***** གཅེར་བུ་འི་ཚོགས་སྨུག་གནག་འབར་བ་
[line 5] གཡོན་རྡེའུ་ཅུང་བསྣམས་། །གདན་མྱེ་སྨུག་གནག་། སྐུ་འི་ཁ་དོག་ནག་མ་ོལ་འཇིག་རྟེན་ཁམས་ཟད་ཅངི ་བསྲེག་པར་བྱས་ནས་། །
[line 6] སླར་དཔལ་ཆེན་པ་ོའ་སྐུ་ལ་ཐིམ་པར་བྱ་འོ། ༠ ། ༠ །ི 62 །ད་ནི་ཕྱི་རིམ་བཤད་པར་བྱ་སྟ་ེ། ཤར་ཕྱོགས་སུ་སིང་ཧ་མུ་ཁ་། ཁ་དོག་སེར་མོ་
[panel 44r]
[line 1] ༆ ། །ཞིང་ཁ་ན་ཐོགས་པ་། ལག་པ་གཡས་གཡོས་བསྣོལ་པ་སེང་ག་ེའི་མགོ་ཅན་། ། ལྷོ་ཕྱོགས་ན་བྷྱ་གྲ་མུ་ཁ་། ཁ་དོག་དམར་63
[line 2] མོ་། ལག་པ་གཉིས་བསྣོལ་ཏེ་མདུན་ངན་ཞིང་གནས་པ་ལ་ལྟ་བ་སྟག་གྱ་ིམགོ་ཅན་། །ནུབ་ཕྱོགས་ན་64 སྣྲི་ཁ་། ཁ་དོག་ནག་མ་ོ
[line 3] ལག་པ་གཉིས་ཀྱསི ་[Gt 274] ཞིང་ཆུང་ངུ་འཛིན་*****ཅིང་ལྕེས་ལྡག་པ་། ཝ་ མགོ་ཅན། **** །བྱང་ཕྱོགས་ན་ཤྭ་ན་མུ་ཁཱ། །
[line 4] ཁ་དོག་མཐིང་ཀ་ལག་པ་གཉིས་*****ཀྱིས་ཁོང་དྲལ་ཏེ་ལྟ་བ་། ཁྱི་མག་ོཅན་*****། ཤར་ལྷོ་འི་མཚམས་ན་ཀྲི་ཏ་ཁ་
[line 5] དོག་དམར་གནག་། ཞིང་ཆུང་ངུ་འི་བ་སུ་ཏ་ཁ་ན་ཐོགས་པ་། ལག་པ་གཡས་པ་ན་བན་དྷ་། གཡོན་གྲི་ཐོགས་པ་། བྱ་རྒོད་མགོ་
[line 6] ཅན། །ལྷོ་ནུབ་མཚམས་ན་ཀང་ཀ། ཁ་དོག་དཀར་དམར་། ཕྲག་པ་གཡོན་པ་ན་ཞིང་ཁེལ་ཞིང་རྐང་པ་ནས་བཟུང་བ་། །
[panel 44v]
[line 1] གཡས་པ་མགོ་འཛིན། བྱ་བཀང་ཀ་འི་འགོ་ལ་མཆུ་རིང། ཐོར་ཏོ་གུག་ཟ་ེབ་དམར། །ནུབ་བྱང་གི་མཚམས་ན། ཀ་ཀ་ཁ་དོག་ནག་མོ་།
[line 2] མཆུས་ཞིང་ཐོགས་པ་། ལག་པ་གཡོན་བས་པད་མོ་བན་དྷ་འཛིན། བྱ་རོག་མགོ་ཅན་། བྱང་ཤར་ཀྱ་ིམཚམས་སུ་ཨུ་ལུ་ཁ་དོག་སྣ་ཚོགས་
[line 3] ལག་པ་གཡོན་པ་དུང་ཅེན་ཁྲག་གིས་གང་****བ་ལ་འཐུང་བ་། གཡས་རྡ་ོརྗ་ལྕགས་ཀྱུ་*****འཛིན། འུག་པའི་མགོ་ཅན་། །ེ
[line 4] ནང་རིམ་འུག་པའི་འཁོར་གིས་བསྐོར་*****། དེ་འི་ཕྱ་ིརིམ་བྱ་རོག་གི་འཁོར་གིས་*****བསྐོར་། །དེ་འི་རིམ་ཀང་ཀ་མཆུ་
[line 5] རིངས་ཀྱ་ིའཁོར་ཀྱསི ་བསྐོར་། ། དེ་འི་ཕྱི་རམི ་བྱ་རྒོད་ཀྱི་འཁོར་གྱིས་བསྐོར་། དེ་དག་ཐམས་ཅད་ཀྱང་ཞངི ་མང་པོ་གསར་རྙིང་སྤུངས་པའི་
6061 ཅྀ་ is added in small writing as a correction, below the line.
62 Here we find two punctuation marks, each of a small circle positioned in the middle of the line, and evenly བྱ་བ་བྱ་བ་: dittography at the turn of the folio.
placed between separating shads.
6364 The final ར is subscribed.
The letter is not a clearly written ཝ་ but is consistent with the ཝ་ given in ཕ་ཝང་ on 54v.4.
[line 6] སྟེང་དུ་། ཞིང་ལ་ལྟོད་པའི་ཕྱིར་འཐབ་པའི་ཚུལ་སྟོན་པ་ཤེ་དག་གོ་། ། ད་ེདག་གི་སྙིང་པོ་ན་ི[Gt 275]འདི་རྣམས་སོ་། །ཧཱུཾ། ཧ། ཧེ། ཕཊ། ཧཱུཾ་།
[panel 45r]
[line 1] ༆། །འདི་ཀུན་འབྲུ་ར་ེརེ་ཡང་ལན་བཞྀ་བཞི་བརྗོད་དོ་། །ཧུང་གིས་གཙོ་བོས་བསྐྱེད་། །ཧས་ནང་གི་ལྷ་མོ་བཞི་བསྐྱེད་། ཧེ་ཕྱི་འ་ིལྷ་
[line 2] མོ་བཞི་བསྐྱེད་། །ཕཊ་གྱིས་ཐམས་ཅད་ཁྲོ་བར་བསྐུལ་། །ཧཱུཾ་གྱིས་ཐམས་ཅད་ཡེ་ཤེས་ཀྱ་ིའོད་གསེར་འབར་བས་ཕྱོགས་བཅུར་ [line 3] ཁྱབ་པར་བགྱི་འོ་།
A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis (’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padma ’phreng gi don bsdus pa)
An extract from chapter eleven in the South Central editions of the Ancient Tantra Collection, and in the Bathang Independent Bka' 'gyur.
Abbreviations:
1. R = Rig ’dzin volume dza, 187r.2-3 (second half of the eighteenth century?)
2. T = Gting skyes volume dza, 205r.5-6 (first half of the nineteenth century, perhaps around 1830?)
3. K = Kathmandu ms. volume ma, *329v.1-2 (perhaps nineteenth century?)
4. The relevant volume of the Nubri manuscript is missing.
5. Bth = Bathang Bka' 'gyur volume rgyud a, 209v.5-6.
༎ །། ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་ཀེ་རུ་ཛ་ཛ་ཧཱུཾ། ཨོཾ་རུ་ལུ་རུ་ལུ་ཧཱུཾ་བྷྱོ་ཧཱུཾ། ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་ཙེའུ་རི་ ཧཱུཾ་ཛ། ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་པྲ་མ་ོཧ་ཧཱུཾ་ཛ། ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་པེ་ཏ་ལི་ཧཱུ་ཾཛ། ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་པུ་ཀ་སི་ཧཱུཾ་ཛ། ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་ཀསྨྲི་ར་ ཧཱུཾ་ཛ། ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་སྨ་ཤ་ནི་ ཧཱུཾ་ཛ། ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་ཙན་ད་ལི་ཧཱུཾ་ཛ། ཧཱུཾ་ཧེ་ཧེ་ཕཊ་ཧཱུཾ།
A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis (’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padma ’phreng gi don bsdus pa)
An extract from chapter eleven in the Bhutanese editions of the Ancient Tantra Collection. All these Bhutanese editions stem from a mid-seventeenth century original from Lha lung.
Abbreviations: 1. Ga = Sgang steng-a volume wa, 58r.3-6
2. Gb = Sgang steng-b volume wa, 58v.3-5
3. Gr = Sgra med rtse volume wa, 53r.3-5 4. M = Mtshams brag volume wa, 70r.2-3
།ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་ཀ་ཽརི་ཛྲ་ཛྲ་ ཧཱུཾ། ཨོཾ་རུ་ལུ་རུ་ལུ་ཧཱུཾ་བྷྱོ། ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་ཙོའུ་ རི་ཧཱུཾ་ ཛ། ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་པྲ་མ་ོཧཾ་ཧཱུཾ་ཛ། ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་བེ་ ཏ་ལི་ཧཱུཾ་ཛ། ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་པཱུ་ཀ་སི་ཧཱུཾ་ཛ། ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་གྷསྨ་ར་ིཧཱུཾ་ཛ། ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་ཀརྨ་ཱ ཧཱུཾ་ཛ། ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་ཙཎྜ་ལི་ཧཱུ་ཾཛ། སིངྒ་མུ་ཛ ། བྱ་གྲི་མུ་ཁ། སྲི་8685ཀ་མུ་ཁ། ཤྭཱ་ ན་མུ་ཀ། གྲི་ཏ་མུ་ཀ། ཀངྐ་མུ་ཀ། ཀཱ་ཁ་མུ་ཀ། ཧཱུ་ལུ་ཀ་མུ་ཁ། ཧཱུཾ་ཧ་ཧེ་ཕཊ་ཧཱུཾ།
A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis (’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padma ’phreng gi don bsdus pa)
An extract from chapter eleven in the Sde dge xylograph editions of the Bka’ ’gyur and Ancient Tantra Collection. The two Sde dge xylograph versions are printed from blocks that are virtually identical in all respects other than the page and volume indicators at the ends of the folios (a few spelling errors appear to have been corrected in D); hence we surmise the par yig for the Ancient Tantra edition was taken from a print of the slightly earlier Bka’ ’gyur edition. The text itself descends from the Tshal pa Bka’ ’gyur transmission.
Abbreviations and Conventions:
1. Dk = Sde dge Bka’ ’gyur, Ancient Tantra (Rnying rgyud), kha (102):607.3-609.7
2. D = Sde dge Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa (Rnying ma’i rgyud ’bum), pa:291r.3-92r.7
3. Ms = Dunhuang manuscript, IOL Tib J 321
4. Bold (ཨ་ོཾ) has been added to indicate text which is highlighted in the Dunhuang
[panel Dk607/D291r]
[line 3] །ཤར་ཕྱོགས་ན་ཕྲ་མེན་མ་ཀ་ཽརི་ཁ་དོག་སྔོན་མོ་ཕྱག་གཉིས་པ་སྟེ། །གཡོན་བྷན་དྷ་
[line 4] ཙནྡན་དམར་གྱིས་བཀང་བ་ཐོགས་པ། །གཡས་ན་ཞིང་ཆུང་ངུའི་དབྱུག་པ་ཐགོ ས་པ། ཨ་ོཾབཛྲ་ག་རཱ་ིཛཿ་ཛཿ་ཧཱཽུ ་ཾཞེས་སྟོང་རྩ་བརྒྱད་བཟླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་ སངས་རྒྱས་ཀྱང་དགུག་ནུས་ན་གཞན་ལྟ་ཅ་ིསྨོས། ཆེ་གེ་མོ་ཞིག་ཁུག་ཅིག་ཅེས་བཅོལ་
[line 5] ནས་གཏོར་མ་དང་ཙནྡན་དམར་ཆེན་ཨརྒྷ་ལ་ ཨ་ོཾརུ་ལུ་རུ་ལུ་ཧཱུ་བྷྱ་ོཾ ཞེས་བརྗདོ ་ཅིང་ཨརྒྷ་ལན་གསུམ་དུ་བསྒྲེང་ངོ་། །ལྷོ་ཕྱོགས་ན་ཙཽ་ར་ིཁ་དོག་སེར་མ་ོ ཕྱག་ན་མདའ་གཞུ་འགེངས་པ། ཨ་ོཾབཛྲ་ཙཽ་རཱ་ཧཱུ་ཾཛཿ་ི ཞེས་སྟོང་རྩ་བརྒྱད་བཅོལ་ན་ཕྱག་ན་རྡོ་
[line 6] རྗེའི་མཐུ་ཡང་རྡུལ་ཙམ་ཡང་མེད་པར་རྐུ་ནུས་ན་གཞན་ལྟ་ཅ་ིསྨོས། ནུབ་ཕྱོགས་ན་པྲ་མོ་ཧ་དམར་མ་ོ [Ms 42v] ཕྱག་ན་ཆུ་སྲིན་གྱི་རྒྱལ་མཚན་ ཐོགས་པ། །ཨ་ོཾབཛྲ་པྲ་མ་ཧ་ཧཱུ་ཾཛཿ་ོ ཞེས་སྟོང་རྩ་བརྒྱད་བཟླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་ཕྱག་ན་རྡོ་རྗ་ེཡང་རང་གི་མཐུ་བཞག་ནས་དབང་དུ་
[line 7] འོང་ན་གཞན་ལྟ་ཅ་ིསྨོས། །བྱང་ཕྱོགས་ན་བ་ཻཏྟ་ལི་ཁ་དོག་ནག་མ་ོཕྱག་གཡོན་ཞིང་ཆུང་ངུ་འཛིན་ཅིང་ཟ་བ། གཡས་ན་རྡོ་རྗེ་འཕྱར་བ། ཨ་ོཾབཛྲ་བ་ཏྟ་ལ་ིཻ ཧཱུ་ཾཛཿ་ཞེས་སྟོང་རྩ་བརྒྱད་བཟླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་འཇིག་རྟེན་དང་འཇིག་རྟེན་ལས་འདས་པའི་དངསོ ་གྲུབ་ཐམས་ཅད་
[panel Dk608/D291v]
[line 1] ཀྱང་འགྲུབ་ན་ འཇིག་རྟེན་གྱི་བསྒྲུབ་པ་ཕྲན་ཚེགས་ལྟ་ཅི་སྨོས། ཤར་ལྷའོི་མཚམས་ན་པུཀྐ་སི་ཁ་ དོག་དམར་སེར་ཕྱག་གཉིས་ཞིང་ཆུང་ངུའི་བ་ སུ་ཏ་འདྲེན་ཅིང་ཟ་བ། ཨ་ོཾབཛྲ་པུཀྐ་ས་ཧཱུ་ཾཛཿ་ི ཞེས་སྟོང་རྩ་བརྒྱད་བཟླས་ཏ་ེབཅོལ་ན་ཕྱག་ན་རྡོ་རྗེ་ཡང་འཆིང་ཞིང་
8586 སྲི་: Gr སི་. ཤྭཱ་: Gr ཤྭ་.
[line 2] འདྲེན་པར་ནུས་ན་གཞན་བཅིང་ཞིང་ཟ་བ་ལྟ་ཅི་སྨོས། ལྷོ་ནུབ་ཀྱ་ིམཚམས་ན་གྷསྨ་ར་ ི [Ms 43r] ཁ་དོག་ལྗང་གུ་ཕྱག་གཡོན་ན་བྷན་དྷ་ ཙནྡན་དམར་པོས་བཀང་བ་རྡོ་རྗསེ ་དཀྲུག་ཅིང་གསོལ་བ། ཨ་ོཾབཛྲ་གྷསྨ་ར་ཧཱུ་ཾཛཿ་ི ཞེས་སྟངོ ་རྩ་བརྒྱད་བཟླས་ཏ་བཅོལ་ན་ཕྱག་ན ེ
[line 3] རྡོ་རྗེ་ཡང་ མྱོས་པར་ནུས་ན་གཞན་ལྟ་སྨོས་ཀྱང་ཅི་དགོས། ནུབ་བྱང་གི་མཚམས་ན་བཛྲ་ཀརྨ་ཁ་དོག་ལྗང་གུ་ཞིང་ཆུང་ངུ་ལག་པ་གཉསི ་ཀྱིས་ བཟུང་སྟ་ེསྙིང་ག་ནས་ཟ་བ། ཨ་ོཾབཛྲ་ཀརྨ་ཧཱུ་ཛཿ་ཾ ཞེས་སྟངོ ་རྩ་བརྒྱད་བཟླས་ཏ་བཅོལ་ན་ལས་གང་བྱ་བ་ཐམས་ཅད་ ེ
[line 4] འགྲུབ་བོ། །བྱང་ཤར་གྱི་མཚམས་ན་ཙཎྜ་ལ་ིཁ་དོག་སེར་སྐྱ་ཕྱག་གཡས་ན་ཞིང་ཆུང་ངུའི་བྷནྡྷ་འཛིན་པ། གཡོན་གྱིས་ཞིང་དབྱུག་འཛིན་ པ། ཨ་ོཾབཛྲ་ཙཎྜ་ལ་ཧཱུ་ཾཛཿ་ི ཞསེ ་སྟོང་རྩ་བརྒྱད་བཟླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་ཟ་མ་དང་མ་ནིང་ཡང་རྒྱུད་འཕེལ་བར་བྱེད་ན་དབང་པོ་
[line 5] ཚང་ཞིང་ཉམས་པ་མེད་པ་ལ་རྒྱུད་འཕེལ་ཞིང་ཚེ་དང་དབང་ཐང་འཕེལ་བར་བྱ་བ་ [Ms 43v] ལྟ་ཅི་སྨོས་ ཏེ། ཕྲ་མེན་མ་འདི་རྣམས་ཕྲིན་ ལས་སྐུལ་བའི་ཚེ་ཨརྒྷ་དང་གཏོར་མ་དབུལ་བ་ནི་གོང་ དུ་སྨོས་པ་བཞིན་དུ་བགྱིའ།ོ །ཁྲོས་ན་ཐམས་ཅད་ཕྱག་ན་ཏྲ་ིཤཱུ་ལ་འབར་བ། གཡོན་
[line 6] རྡེའུ་ཆུང་ བསྣམས་པ། གདན་མེ་སྨུག་ནག །སྐུའི་ཁ་དོག་ནག་མོ་ལ་ཁྲག་དང་ཞག་དང་ཐལ་བའི་ཐགི ་ ལེས་ཚོམ་བུར་བྱས་ཤིང་བ་སུ་ཏས་ རྐེད་པ་བཅིངས་པ། གསེར་གྱི་པགས་པ་གོ་ཟུར་བགོས་ པ་སྲོད་ཏ་ཨ་ཛ་ནས་ལུས་བརྒྱན་ཏ་ེགཅེར་བུའི་ཚོགས་སྨུག་
[line 7] གནག་འབར་ བ། གཡོན་རྡེའུ་ཆུང་བསྣམས་པ། གཡས་མ་ེསྨུག་ཀུན་ཀ་ཁ་དོག་ནག་མོ་ལ་འཇིག་རྟེན་ གྱི་ཁམས་བསྲེགས་ཤིང། ཟད་པར་ བྱས་ནས་སླར་དཔལ་ཆེན་པའོི་སྐུ་ལ་ཐིམ་པར་བྱའོ། ། དེ་ནི་ཕྱ་ིརིམ་བཤད་པར་བྱའོ། །ཤར་ཕྱོགས་སུ་སིངྷ་མུ་ཁ་ཁ་
[panel Dk609/D292r]
[line 1] དོག་སེར་མོ་ [Ms 44r] ཞིང་ཆུང་ཁ་ ན་ཐོགས་པ། ལག་པ་གཡས་གཡོན་བསྣོལ་བ། སིང་གེའི་མགོ་ཅན། ལྷོ་ཕྱོགས་ན་བྱ་གྷྲ་ི མུ་ ཁ་ཁ་དོག་དམར་མོ་ལག་པ་གཉིས་བསྣོལ་ཏེ་མདུན་ན་ཞངི ་གནས་པ་ལ་ལྟ་བ། སྟག་གི་ མགོ་ཅན་ནུབ་
[line 2] ཕྱོགས་སུ་ སྲིན་གླ་མུ་ཁ་ཁ་དོག་ནག་མ་ོལག་པ་གཉིས་ཞིང་ཆུང་ངུ་འཛིན་ཅིང་ལྕེས་ལྡག་པ་ཝ་མགོ་ ཅན། བྱང་ཕྱོགས་ན་ཤྭ་ན་མུ་ཁ་ཁ་དོག་ མཐིང་ག་ཞིང་ལག་པ་གཉིས་ཀྱིས་ཁོང་དྲལ་ཏ་ེལྟ་ བ་ཁྱི་མགོ་ཅན། ཤར་ལྷོའི་མཚམས་སུ་ཀྲྀཌྷ་མུ་ཁ་ཁ་
[line 3] དོག་དམར་གནག་ ཞིང་ཆུང་ངུའི་བ་སུ་ཏ་ཁ་ན་ཐོགས་པ། ལག་པ་གཡས་བྷན་དྷ་གཡོན་གྲི་ཐོགས་པ་བྱ་ རྒོད་ཀྱི་མགོ་ཅན། ལྷོ་ནུབ་ མཚམས་ན་ཀངྐ་མུ་ཁ་ཁ་དགོ ་དཀར་དམར་ཕྲག་པ་གཡན་པ་ལ་ ཞིང་ཁེལ་ཞིང་རྐང་པ་ནས་བཟུང་བ། ོ [Ms 44v] གཡས་པ་
[line 4] མགོ་འཛིན་ པ། བྱ་ཀངྐའི་མགོ་ཅན་མཆུ་རངི ་ཐོར་ཏོ་གུག་ཟ་ེབ་དམར་མ། །ནུབ་བྱང་མཚམས་ན་ཀཱ་ཀ་ མུ་ཁ་ཁ་དོག་ནག་མོ། །བྱ་རོག་གི་ོ མགོ་ཅན་མཆུས་ཞིང་ཐོགས་པ། ལག་པ་གཡོན་བས་པདྨ་ བྷན་དྷ་འཛིན་པ། བྱང་ཤར་མཚམས་སུ་ཨཱུ་ལཱུ་ཀ་
[line 5] མུ་ཁ་ཁ་དོག་སྣ་ ཚོགས་ལག་པ་གཡོན་པ་དུང་ཆེན་ཁྲག་གིས་བཀང་བ་ལ་འཐུང་བ་ལ་གཡས་པ་རྡོ་རྗེ་ལྕགས་ ཀྱུ་འཛིན་པ། འུག་པའི་མགོ་ ཅན། ནང་རིམ་འུག་པའི་འཁོར་གྱིས་བསྐོར། དེ་འི་ཕྱི་ རིམ་བྱ་རོག་གི་འཁརོ ་གྱས་བསྐོར། དེ་འི་ཕྱི་རམི ་བྱ་ཀང་ཀ་མཆུ་ ི
[line 6] རིངས་ཀྱ་ི འཁོར་གྱིས་བསྐོར། དེའི་ཕྱི་རིམ་བྱ་རྒོད་ཀྱི་འཁོར་གྱིས་བསྐོར། དེ་དག་ཐམས་ ཅད་ཀྱང་ཞིང་མང་པོ་གསར་རྙིང་སྤུངས་པའི་སྟེང་ ན་ཞིང་ལ་རྟོད་པའི་ཕྱིར་འཐབ་པའི་ ཚུལ་སྟོན་པ་ཤ་སྟག་གོ། །དེ་དག་གི་སྙངི ་པོ་འདི་རྣམས་སོ། །ཧཱུ་ཾཧ་ཧ་ཕཊ་ཧཱུཾེ ། [Ms 45r] འདི་ [line 7] ཀུན་འབྲུ་རེ་ར་ེཡང་ལན་བཞ་བཞི་བརྗོད་དོ། །ི ཧཱུ་ཾགིས་གཙོ་བོ་བསྐྱེད། ཧས་ནང་གི་ལྷ་མོ་བསྐྱེད། ཧེས་ཕྱིའི་ལྷ་མོ་བསྐྱེད། ཕཊ་ཀྱིས་ཐམས་ ཅད་ཁྲོས་པར་བསྐུལ། ཧཱུ་ཾགསི ་ཐམས་ཅད་ཀྱ་ཡེ་ཤེས་ཀྱ་ིའི ོད་ཟེར་འབར་བས་ཕྱོགས་བཅུར་ཁྱབ་པར་བགྱིའོ།
Glossary
Note: these glossary entries are organized in Tibetan alphabetical order. All entries list the following information in this order: THL Extended Wylie transliteration of the term, THL Phonetic rendering of the term, the English translation, the Sanskrit equivalent, the Chinese equivalent, other equivalents such as Mongolian or Latin, associated dates, and the type of term.
Dunhuang Tibetan manuscripts held at the British Library, London:
IOL Tib J 321 (Thabs kyi zhags pa pad ma ’phreng ba gi don bsdus pa’i ’grel pa’); IOL Tib J 438.
IDP: The International Dunhuang Project (http://idp.bl.uk/). Contains digital images of many items, and a catalogue (Dalton and van Schaik 2005).
Editions of the Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa [NGB]
Sde dge [D]: The Sde dge edition of the Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa. Twenty-six volumes, ka-ra, plus Dkar chag volume a. Sde dge par khang. The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo’i phreng is in volume pa,
286r-298r.
Mtshams brag [M]: The Mtshams brag Manuscript of the Rñiṅ ma rgyud ’bum (rgyud ’bum/ mtshams brag dgon pa). Thimphu: National Library, Royal
Government of Bhutan, 1982. Forty-six volumes. (Microfiche available from
The Institute for Advanced Studies of World Religions, LMpj 014,862 - 014, 907. An electronicversion is now availablefrom the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (http://www.tbrc.org), under the title, The Mtshams brag Manuscript of the Rñiṅ ma rgyud ’bum (rgyud ’bum/ mtshams brag dgon pa) (Rnying ma rgyud ’bum [[[mtshams brag]] dgon pa’i bris ma]), W21521. It is also available online, at http://www.thlib.org/encyclopedias/literary/canons/ngb/ ngbcat.php#cat=tb/0416). The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo ’phreng gi don bsdus pa is in vol. wa, 123-52.
Sgang steng [G]: The Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa manuscripts preserved by Sgang steng Monastery, Bhutan. Forty-six volumes. (Digital images were made under an AHRC funded project at Oxford University. The collection consulted is the Sgang steng-b manuscript; more recently, the other manuscript collection held at the monastery - Sgang steng-a - has also been photographed as part of a British Library Endangered Archives Research Project http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/endangeredarch/phuntsho.html). The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo ’phreng gi don bsdus pa is in wa:51r-65r.
Gting skyes [T]: Rñiṅ ma rgyud ’bum Reproduced from the MS preserved at Gtiṅ-skyes Dgon-pa-byaṅ Monastery in Tibet, under the direction of Dingo Khyentse Rimpoche, Thimbu, 1973. (Microfiche of some volumes available from The Institute for Advanced Studies of World Religions, LMpj 011,825 - 012,584.) The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padma phreng gi don bsdus pa is in dza:395-422.
Rig ’dzin tshe dbang nor bu [R]: The Rig ’dzin tshe dbang nor bu edition of the Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa. Twenty-nine volumes are held at the British Library, under the classification, “RNYING MA’I RGYUD ’BUM MSS,” with the pressmark, OR15217. Volume ka is held at the Bodleian Library Oxford at the shelfmark, MS. Tib.a.24(R). (Microfilm is available from The British Library, and the Bodleian Library for volume ka). Title folios to volume ga and volume a are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Accession nos.: IM 318-1920 and IM 317-1920. The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padma phreng gi don bsdus pa is in dza:180r-93r.
Kathmandu [K]: Manuscript edition of the Ancient Tantra Collectionof the Rnying ma pa from the Nubri area, held by The National Archives, Kathmandu. (Microfilm is available.) The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo ’phreng gi don bsdus pa is in ma:20r-36r.
Bka’ ’gyur and Bstan ’gyur Collections
(Note that copies of the Independent Bka’ ’gyurs of Hemis, from Hemis Tshoms lha khang, and of ’Ba’ thang, which is held in the Newark Museum, New York, have not yet been made available in published form. The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa pad mo ’phreng gis don bsdus pa occurs in Volume Rgyud a of the ’Ba’ thang Bka’ ’gyur, ff.204r-214r, and the ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo phreng gyi don bsdus pa occurs in Volume Rgyud ka of the Hemis Bka’ ’gyur, ff.31r-45v.)
The Sde dge Bka’ ’gyur, the Sde-dge mtshal-par bka’-’gyur [Dk]: a facsimile edition of the eighteenth century redaction of Si-tu chos-kyi-’byun-gnas prepared under the direction of H.H. the Sixteenth Rgyal-dban karma-pa, 1976-1979. 103 volumes. Delhi, Karmapae Chodhey, Gyalwae Sungrab Partun Khang. A CD version is available from the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, New York (W22084). The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo’i phreng is in volume Rnying rgyud kha, 597-621.
The Lha sa Bka’ ’gyur [Hk], 1978. 101 volumes. Microfiche set made from a xylograph completed in the early twentieth century, kept in Rashi Gempil Ling (First Kalmuck Buddhist Temple) in Howell, New Jersey. Stony Brook, N. Y.: The Institute for Advanced Studies of World Religions. The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo’i phreng is in volume Rgyud wa, 472v-492r.
The ’Jang sa tham or Li thang Bka’ ’gyur [J], from the private collection of Namkha Drime Rinpoche, Jeerang, Orissa. The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo’i phreng is in volume Rgyud ’bum (Rnying rgyud), wa, 294v-307r. It is available in prints or copies made from the microfilm held at the
Staatsbibliothek, Berlin.
The Snar thang Bka’ ’gyur [Nk] and Bstan ’gyur [Nt], Narthang Bka’ ’gyur, 102 volumes, set at the International Academy of Indian Culture, New Delhi, scanned by the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, New York (W22703). The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo’i phreng is in the Snar thang Bka’ ’gyur volume Rgyud wa, 816-855. The new Snar thang Bstan ’gyur edition (from the blocks made in 1741-1742), in 225 volumes. Note that the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, New York, have scanned a copy in 225 volumes, preserved at Tibet House, Delhi, supplemented with pages and volumes from Dharamsala and libraries in the U.S.A. (W22704). The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo ’phreng gi don bsdus pa’i ’grel pa is in the Snar thang Bstan ’gyur volume Rgyud bu (77): 176-228.
The Peking Bka’ ’gyur [Qk] and Bstan ’gyur [Qt], reprinted and catalogued in The Tibetan Tripitaka, Peking Edition, kept in the library of the Otani University, Kyoto, edited by D. T. Suzuki, 1955-1961. Vol. 1-45 Bkaḥ-ḥgyur. Vol. 46-150 Bstan-ḥgyur. Vol. 151 Dkar-chag. Vol. 152-164 Extra (Btsoṅ Kha Pa/Lcaṅ Skya). Vol. 165-168 Catalogue. Tokyo, Kyoto: Suzuki Research Foundation. The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo’i phreng is in the Bkaḥ-ḥgyur Rgyud wa:299v-313r and the ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo ’phreng gi don bsdus pa’i ’grel pa is in the Bstan-ḥgyur Rgyud ’grel bu:101r-129v.
The Urga Bka’ ’gyur [U], edited by Lokesh Chandra, 1990-1994, from the collection of Prof. Raghuvira. 105 volumes. Delhi: International Academy of Indian Culture and Aditya Prakashan. The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo’i phreng is in volume Rnying rgyud kha, 597-621.
The Golden Bstan ’gyur (Gser gyi lag bris ma) [Gt], produced between 1731-1741, currently held at Ganden Monastery; published in Tianjing 1988, digitally scanned for TBRC, New Delhi 2002. A CD version is available from the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, New York (W23702). The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo ’phreng gi don bsdus pa’i ’grel pa commentary is in volume Rgyud ’grel bu (78): 243-321.
Other Tibetan Sources
Bdud ’joms gling pa. Padma’i rnam rol bdud ’joms gling pa’i skor nye brgyud zab gter chos mdzod rin po che. Edited by H. H. Bdud-’joms
’jigs-bral-ye-ses-rdo-rje. Kalimpong: Dupjung Lama, 1978. An electronic version is now available from the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (http://www.tbrc.org), under the title, The Collected Gter-ma Rediscoveries of Gter-chen Bdud-’joms-gling-pa, W21728.
Bdud ’joms rin po che, ’Jigs bral ye shes rdo rje. The Collected Writings and Revelations of H. H. bDud-’joms Rin-po-che ’Jigs bral ye shes rdo rje. Kalimpong: Dupjung Lama, 1979-1985. An electronic version is now available from the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (http://www.tbrc.org), under the title, Bdud ’joms ’jigs bral ye shes rdo rje’i gsung ’bum, W20869, 0334-0358. 25 vols.
Bka’ ma shin tu rgyas pa (Snga ’gyur bka’ ma) 120 volumes, published by KaH thog mkhan po ’jam dbyangs, Chengdu 1999, scanned by the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, New York (W25983). The ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo ’phreng gi don bsdus pa’i ’grel pa is in volume wu (80), 125-236, copied from the Peking Bstan ’gyur.
’Jam mgon kong sprul blo gros mtha’ yas. Dpal rdo rje phur pa rtsa ba’i rgyud kyi dum bu’i ’grel pa snying po bsdud pa dpal chen dgyes pa’i zhal lung. In Bdud ’joms bka’ ma [[[Bdud-’Joms ’Jigs-bral-ye-śes-rdo-rje Rñin ma Bka’ ma rgyas pa]]]. Vol. tha, 15-213. Kalimpong: Dupjung Lama, 1982-1987.
Klong chen pa. Dpal gsang ba’i snying po de kho na nyid nges pa’i rgyud kyi ’grel pa phyogs bcu’i mun pa thams cad rnam par sel ba. In Bdud ’joms bka’ ma [[[Bdud-’Joms ’Jigs-bral-ye-śes-rdo-rje Rñin ma Bka’ ma rgyas pa]]]. Vol. la, 5-629. Kalimpong: Dupjung Lama, 1982-1987.
Mi pham rgya mtsho. Gsang ’grel phyogs bcu’i mun sel gyi spyi don ’od gsal snying po. In ’Jam mgon ’ju mi pham rgya mtsho’i gsung ’bum rgyas pa sde dge dgon chen par ma. Vol. 19, 1-272. Paro: Lama Ngodrup and Sherab Drimey, 1984-1993. An electronic version is available from the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Centre (http://www.tbrc.org), under the title, bDud ’joms ’jigs bral ye shes rdo rje’i gsung ’bum, W23468. 27 vols.
’Phang thang ma/ dkar chag ’phang thang ma/ sgra sbyor bam po gnyis pa. Beijing: Mi rigs dpe skrun khang, 2003.
Rong zom, chos kyi bzang po. Rong zom bka’ ’bum. Thimphu: Kunsang Topgay, 1976. Reproduced from a manuscript copy of an incomplete print from the Zhe chen wood blocks, with the detailed Dkar chag of ’Jam mgon mi pham.
Works in Other Languages
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Bédier, J. “La tradition manuscrite du Lai de l’Ombre: réflexions sur l’art d’éditer les anciens textes.” Romania 54 (1928): 161-196, 321-356.
Cantwell, C. “To Meditate upon Consciousness as Vajra: Ritual ‘Killing and Liberation’ in the rNying-ma-pa Tradition.” In Tibetan Studies: Proceedings of the 7th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Graz 1995. Edited by H. Krasser, M. T. Much, E. Steinkellner, and H. Tauscher. Vol. 1, 107-118. Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997.
———. “Variations in Tibetan Buddhist Meditations on Deities: Reflections on the Process of Generating Practices.” Unpublished paper presented to the UK Association for Buddhist Studies Conference: Buddhism and Popular Culture, Lancaster, July 2006.
———, and R. Mayer. The Kīlaya Nirvāṇa Tantra and the Vajra Wrath Tantra: Two Texts from the Ancient Tantra Collection. Vienna: The Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2007.
———, and R. Mayer. Early Tibetan Documents on Phur pa from Dunhuang. Vienna: The Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2008.
———, and R. Mayer. “Continuity and Change in Tibetan Mahāyoga Ritual: Some Evidence from the Tabzhag (Thabs zhags) Manuscript and Other Dunhuang Texts.” In Tibetan Ritual. Edited by J. Cabezón, 69-88. New York: OUP, 2010.
———, and R. Mayer. “The Dunhuang Thabs kyi zhags pa padma ’phreng gi don bsdus pa’i ’grel pa’ Manuscript: A Source for Understanding the Transmission of Mahāyoga in Tibet. A Progress Report.” To appear in OTDO Monograph Series 3. Edited by M. Kapstein and Y. Imaeda. In press.
———, and Geoffrey Samuel (with contributions by R. Mayer and P. Ogyan Tanzin). The Seed of Immortal Life: Contexts and Meanings of a Tibetan Longevity Practice. Kathmandu: Vajra Press, forthcoming.
Davidson, R. “Gsar ma Apocrypha: The Creation of Orthodoxy, Gray Texts, and the New Revelation.” In The Many Canons of Tibetan Buddhism. Edited by D. Germano and H. Eimer, 203-224. Leiden: Brill, 2002.
Dorje, G. “The Guhyagarbhatantra and its XIVth Century Commentary, phyogs-bcu mun-sel.” Unpublished Ph.D thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1988.
Eastman, K. W. “Mahāyoga texts at Tun-huang.” Bulletin of Institute of Buddhist Cultural Studies 22 (1983): 42-60.
Eimer, H. “A Source for the First Narthang Kanjur: Two Early Sa skya pa Catalogues of the Tantras.” In Transmission of the Tibetan Canon: Papers Presented at a Panel of the 7th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Graz 1995. Edited by H. Eimer, 11-78. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997a.
———. “Editorial.” In Transmission of the Tibetan Canon: Papers Presented at a Panel of the 7th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Graz 1995. Edited by H. Eimer, vii-x. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997b.
———. “Structure of the Tibetan Kanjur.” In The Many Canons of Tibetan Buddhism. Edited by H. Eimer and D. Germano, 57-72. Leiden: Brill, 2002.
Gray, David B. “On the Very Idea of a Tantric Canon: Myth, Politics, and the Formation of the Bka’ ’gyur.” Journal of the International Association of
Ti b e t a n S t u d i e s , n o . 5 ( D e c e m b e r 2 0 0 9 ) : http://www.thlib.org/collections/texts/jiats/#jiats=/05/gray/.
Harrison, P. Druma-kinnara-rāja-paripṛcchā-sūtra. A Critical Edition of the Tibetan Text (Recension A). Tokyo: IIBS, 1992.
Herrmann-Pfandt, A. Die lHan kar ma: Ein früher Katalog der ins Tibetische übersetzten buddhistischen Texte. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2008.
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Keesing, R. Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective. Florida: Harcourt Brace, 1981.
Martin, D. Tibskrit Philology. Jerusalem, April 2006. Available at: http://tibetan-studies-resources.blogspot.com/2006/04/tibskrit-bibliography-of-tibetan.html.
Mayer, R. A Scripture of the Ancient Tantra Collection: The Phur-pa bcu-gnyis. Oxford: Kiscadale Publications, 1996.
McGann, J. J. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Silk, J. The Heart Sūtra in Tibetan: A Critical Edition of the Two Recensions Contained in the Kanjur. Wein: Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien Universität Wien, 1994.
Skilling, P. “From bKa’ bstan bcos to bKa’ ’gyur and bsTan ’gyur.” In Transmission of the Tibetan Canon. Edited by H. Eimer, 87-111. Vienna: The Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 1997.
Stanley, D. P. The Tibetan Buddhist Canon: The Kangyur (Bka’ ’gyur) and Tengyur (Bstan ’gyur). The Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL). http://www.thlib.org/encyclopedias/literary/canons/index.php#essay=/stanley/tibcanons/, 2005.
Tauscher, H., and B. Lainé. “Western Tibetan Kanjur Tradition.” In The Cultural History of Western Tibet: Recent Research from the China Tibetology Research Center and the University of Vienna. Edited by D. Klimburg-Salter, Liang J., H. Tauscher, and Zhou Y., 339-362. Beijing, Vienna: China Tibetology Publishing House, 2008.
Timpanaro, S. The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method. Edited and translated by G. W. Most. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Tomabechi, T. “Selected Tantra Fragments from Tabo Monastery.” In Tabo Studies II: Manuscripts, Texts, Inscriptions, and the Arts. Edited by E. Steinkellner and C. A. Scherrer-Schaub, 55-98. Serie Orientale Roma, no. 87. Rome: IsIAO, 1999.
van Schaik, S. “A Definition of Mahāyoga.” In Tantric Studies 1, 45-88. Hamburg: Center for Tantric Studies, 2008.
Wangchuk, D. “An Eleventh-Century Defence of the Authenticity of the Guhyagarbha Tantra.” In The Many Canons of Tibetan Buddhism. Edited by D. Germano and H. Eimer, 265-291. Leiden: Brill, 2002.
Wangdu, P., and H. Diemberger. dBa’ bzhed: The Royal Narrative Concerning the Bringing of the Buddha’s Doctrine to Tibet. Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2000.
