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Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies Issue 5 — December 2009 ISSN 1550-6363 An online journal published by the Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL) www.jiats.org Editors-in-Chief: José I. Cabezón and David Germano Guest Editor: Kurtis R. Schaeffer Book Review Editor: Bryan J. Cuevas Managing Editor: Steven Weinberger Assistant Editor: William McGrath Technical Director: Nathaniel Grove Contents Articles • Contributions to the Development and Classiication of Abhisamayālaṃkāra Literature in Tibet from the Ninth to Fourteenth Centuries (56 pages) – James B. Apple • A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis: Methodological Issues in the Study of a Mahāyoga Text from Dunhuang (51 pages) – Cathy Cantwell and Robert Mayer • On the Very Idea of a Tantric Canon: Myth, Politics, and the Formation of the Bka’ ’gyur (37 pages) – David B. Gray • Recovering a Lost Literary Heritage: Preliminary Research on the Wanli Bka’ ’gyur from Berlin (27 pages) – Agnieszka Helman-Ważny • Two Bka’ ’gyur Works in Mahāmudrā Canons: The Ārya-ātajñāna-nāma-mahāyāna-sūtra and the Anāvila-tantra-rāja (24 pages) – Roger R. Jackson • Classicism in Commentarial Writing: Exegetical Parallels in the Indian Mūlamadhyamakakārikā Commentaries (67 pages) – Ulrich Timme Kragh • Canonical Literature in Western Tibet and the Structural Analysis of Canonical Collections (27 pages) – Bruno Lainé • The Role of the Bodhicittavivaraṇa in the Mahāmudrā Tradition of the Dwags po bka’ brgyud (31 pages) – Klaus-Dieter Mathes • Notes on the Co ne Bka’ ’gyur and Bstan ’gyur in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (14 pages) – Susan Meinheit ii • Guṇaprabha’s Vinayasūtra Corpus: Texts and Contexts (19 pages) – Paul K. Nietupski • On the Vicissitudes of Subhūticandra’s Kāmadhenu Commentary on the Amarakoṣa in Tibet – Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp • Pseudepigrapha in the Tibetan Buddhist “Canonical Collections”: The Case of the Caryāmelāpakapradīpa Commentary Attributed to Śākyamitra (31 pages) – Christian K. Wedemeyer Book Reviews • Akester’s Rejoinder to M. Goldstein’s Response to “Review of A History of Modern Tibet, Volume 2: The Calm before the Storm, 1951-55, by Melvyn C. Goldstein” (4 pages) – Matthew Akester • Review of Tibetan Ritual, edited by José Ignacio Cabezón (12 pages) – Christopher Bell • Review of The Culture of the Book in Tibet, by Kurtis R. Schaeffer (3 pages) – Hildegard Diemberger • Goldstein’s Response to M. Akester’s “Review of A History of Modern Tibet, Volume 2: The Calm before the Storm, 1951-55, by Melvyn C. Goldstein” (12 pages) – Melvyn C. Goldstein • Review of Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri’s Mission to Tibet, by Trent Pomplun (6 pages) – Michael Sweet Abstracts Contributors to this Issue iii A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis: Methodological Issues in the Study of a Mahāyoga Text - from Dunhuang1 Cathy Cantwell University of Oxford Robert Mayer University of Oxford Abstract: The Dunhuang manuscript IOL Tib J 321 is a Rnying ma tantra commentary in eighty-ive 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. 1 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 inal 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 clariied our picture of the historical transmission of the text. Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009): 1-51. http://www.thlib.org?tid=T5696. 1550-6363/2009/5/T5696. © 2009 by Cathy Cantwell, Robert Mayer, Tibetan and Himalayan Library, and International Association of Tibetan Studies. Distributed under the THL Digital Text License. Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 2 Introduction This paper is a brief relection on the culture of tolerable scriptural variation that we ind in Rnying ma Buddhism. It raises methodological issues for textual scholars of the Rnying ma tantras, which, although speciic 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, in many 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 grammatical error! Those are quite different issues. 2. If Bka’ ’gyur scholarship is currently emphasising the non-unitary and varied nature 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 irst. 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 cumulative effect of centuries of dissociated hypercorrections made without recourse 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 Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 3 are shared by all the scriptural texts, and repeated in all major practice texts.2 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 distributive understanding of knowledge, very like the understanding of 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 afirm 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 ind out tomorrow he had in doing so inadvertently labelled Gter chen B or Mkhan chen C as deinitely 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 2 Generally, commentarial writings will consider only the readings witnessed in the speciic liturgical tradition on which they are commenting, but occasionally, variation is acknowledged. Kong sprul’s commentary on the Rdo rje phur pa rtsa ba’i rgyud kyi dum bu (’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 [Kalimpong: Dupjung Lama, 1982-1987], 78-80) explicitly recognizes one variant in the irst root verse (thig le/thigs pa), and implicitly acknowledges another (sgor shar/gor shar), elucidating the text with reference to the alternative connotations. Kong sprul (Kong sprul, Bdud ’joms bka’ ma, vol. tha, 92-93) furthermore draws attention to a contrast between the reading of the Rdo rje phur pa rtsa ba’i rgyud kyi dum bu and of Ancient Tantra Collection texts for the second root verse, suggesting they can be understood as variant translations, and reiterating that the signiicance of these profound vajra words of the root tantras is the same in both cases (bsgyur ba gnyis don ni gong du bshad pa dang ’dra’o; Kong sprul, vol. tha, 92.6). See the discussion in C. Cantwell, “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, ed. H. Krasser, M. T. Much, E. Steinkellner, and H. Tauscher (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997), 1:115. Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 4 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 relections.3 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,4 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 ixed entity. In addition, we are aware of the works by colleagues in parallel ields, notably the modern Talmudists, who have clariied the way in which anonymous collective scriptural authorship may work on the ground. Nevertheless, we do not want to extrapolate from other ields, 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 ifteenth century. In its fullest editions, this collection nowadays includes around one thousand works, in about thirty-ive 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.5 Either way, the Rnying ma tantras have had, and continue to have, a very powerful inluence on Tibetan religion. 3 Since writing the above, we have noticed David Gray’s article in JIATS (David Gray, “On the Very Idea of a Tantric Canon: Myth, Politics, and the Formation of the Bka’ ’gyur,” Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 [December 2009]: http://www.thlib.org/collections/texts/jiats/#jiats=/05/gray/), which discusses different versions of this mythic ideal throughout Tibetan Buddhism, including the speciically Rnying ma version of the revelation of the tantras of Mahāyoga to King Jaḥ. In conclusion, Gray makes the point that the absence of the ideal texts was a factor in preventing absolute canon closure. 4 J. Silk, 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), 31-41. 5 Many (although not all) of these tantras are presented with Sanskrit equivalent titles and colophons naming one or more of the illustrious igures from the traditional historical accounts of the early transmissions as translators. Some later Rnying ma voices argued that these texts were indeed verbatim translations from Sanskrit originals from the reign of Khri srong lde’u btsan. By contrast, much (not Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 5 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, inds 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 speciically, 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 inluential 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,” 283-284). 6 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. 7 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. Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 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 dificult 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 dificulties, 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 ifteenth 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 inluential, 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 irst, 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 Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 7 stage in their study, useful insights can certainly be gained by browsing the texts just as one inds them. But undoubtedly we get a much iner 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 dificult 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 afiliations. 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 inluence 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 inding 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 luid and permeable, at this stage we tend to emphasize regional 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 ind 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 Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 8 editions.9 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 ine 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 distinguished for modern users of the microilm copy), and we cannot know 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.10 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 ind within it fascinating views into the ritual and religious world of post-Imperial Tibet, but also for the beneit 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 9 We discuss this feature elsewhere (Cantwell and Mayer, The Kīlaya Nirvāṇa Tantra, 74-78). These emendations, which appear not to have been made by the original scribe, cannot be considered a comment on the standards adopted by the edition’s editors, yet had a future copyist adopted them, they would have impacted on the textual tradition. 10 In many of the Sde dge Ancient Tantra Collection edition’s texts, there are occasional marginal notes which supply alternative readings. There were eight such notes in the Rdo rje phur bu chos thams cad mya ngan las ’das pa’i rgyud chen po (Myang ’das), and two in The Vajra Wrath, Root Vajrakīlaya Tantra (Rdo rje khros pa phur pa rtsa ba’i rgyud; see Cantwell and Mayer, The Kīlaya Nirvāṇa Tantra; the alternative readings are most easily examined by browsing the diplomatic editions of the Sde dge texts given on the accompanying CD). In some cases, the notes could be seen as suggesting better readings or amending a reading, but often the variant merely suggests an alternative or underlines a textual crux. Generally, the variants are followed by wording which could be translated as, “also/alternatively, we ind…” such as kyang/yang, yin nam, or simply, byung. In one case in the Myang ’das (Sde dge, vol. zha, f.76v; Cantwell and Mayer, The Kīlaya Nirvāṇa Tantra, 214, nb 572), Sde dge’s two readings, mgyogs and ’khyog, essentially corresponded to differing alternative readings of the Bhutanese and the South Central editions. Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 9 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 dificulty 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.11 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 irst 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:12 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.13 Soon after, Peter Skilling found that in a signiicant number of speciic 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, 11 See Cantwell and Mayer, The Kīlaya Nirvāṇa Tantra, 14, for a discussion of J. Bédier, “La tradition manuscrite du Lai de l’Ombre: rélexions sur l’art d’éditer les anciens textes,” Romania 54 (1928): 161-196, 321-356; for Timpanaro, see especially his essay, “Textual Criticism and Linguistics, and their Crises at the End of the Nineteenth and in the Twentieth Century,” in S. Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, edited and translated by G. W. Most (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 119-138. 12 See P. Harrison, Druma-kinnara-rāja-paripṛcchā-sūtra. A Critical Edition of the Tibetan Text (Recension A) (Tokyo: IIBS, 1992), xlvi-xlviii. Apart from his important pioneering studies, which began the work of clarifying the textual relationships between the Bka’ ’gyur editions, Helmut Eimer has continued to play a central role in the continuing development of Bka’ ’gyur and Bstan ’gyur studies. 13 Helmut Eimer, “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 (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997b), viii. It goes without saying that in an open tradition, the variant versions can interact with one another at any stage, thereby further confusing the issue. 14 Texts of proto-Bka’ ’gyur collections found in Western Tibet seem to represent a further line of descent (H. Tauscher 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. [Beijing, Vienna: China Tibetology Publishing House, 2008], 350, 358). Also see P. Skilling, “From bKa’ bstan bcos to Bka’ ’gyur and Bstan ’gyur,” in Transmission of the Tibetan Canon, edited by H. Eimer (Vienna: The Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 1997), 101. Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 10 underlines this caution. For instance, Tomabechi discovered15 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 luidity of the Indian Buddhist scriptures themselves, before translation into Tibetan.16 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 ixation 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.17 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 identiiable 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,18 and despite their considerable corruption, and the sometimes very considerable differences between their different witnesses, we did not ind 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 15 T. Tomabechi, “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, Serie Orientale Roma, no. 87 (Rome: IsIAO, 1999), 56, 76–78. 16 Harrison, Druma-kinnara-rāja-paripṛcchā-sūtra, xlvi, remarks, “we are already familiar with the same… with regard to Sanskrit texts: this century has seen the demise of the notion of ‘the text’… we are… accustomed to… a textual tradition.” 17 Unlike the Masoretic Bible with its single ixed form and the effective effacing of all variants, in medieval Jewish Rabbinic literature, pericopes, long divorced from any original context, are shared between different texts, while texts and pericopes alike vary endlessly over time and space. Since such characteristics are shared by Indian Mahāyāna scriptures, Silk suggests that Schäfer’s analysis is relevant to Buddhist Studies (Jonathan Silk, Numata Lecture, Oxford May 19th, 2008, “What Can Students of Indian Buddhist Literature Learn from Biblical Text Criticism?”). 18 R. Mayer, A Scripture of the Ancient Tantra Collection: The Phur-pa bcu-gnyis (Oxford: Kiscadale Publications, 1996); 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). Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 11 of editorial intervention to standardize spellings of mantras and so forth. One text even seemed partially amenable to stemmatic reconstruction,19 although biidity 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 identiiable 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.20 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 igures within the literary culture of the Ancient Tantra Collection. We 19 20 Cantwell and Mayer, Kīlaya Nirvāṇa Tantra, 79. Of course, apart from a handful of key texts like the Secret Essence Tantra (Rgyud gsang ba snying po), most of these texts are not the object of regular classroom study in monastic curricula. Yet they are read by the very learned, for ediication and inspiration. Understood as the backbone of the Rnying ma tradition on which the all-pervading “Treasure” Revelations (Gter ma) are textually dependent, they are held in great esteem. Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 12 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 luid 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 irst an explanation of center (dkyil), followed by an elaboration of the term, circle (’khor).21 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.22 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 21 We understand from Sanskritist colleagues that it is extremely unlikely that the Sanskrit word, maṇḍala, could have been similarly separated into two parts with exactly these implications. It seems then, that this part of the Commentary cannot be an unmediated translation from a Sanskrit original. It is worth noting that Tibetan commentarial traditions sometimes break the Sanskrit word, maṇḍala, into two for the purpose of glossing its meaning, but the connotations would not correspond neatly to the Tibetan equivalent term. For instance, Mi pham glosses maṇḍal as essence or vital juice, and la as taking or holding, so that maṇḍala would mean, to grasp the essence enlightened qualities. He adds that if the word is taken as a whole, it can also mean, completely circular or entirely surrounded, and hence is translated as dkyil ’khor: maṇḍal ni snying po’am/ bcud dang la ni len cing ’dzin pa ste snying po’i yon tan ’dzin pa’i gzhir gyur pa’am/ rnam pa gcig tu sgra ’brel mar thad kar bsgyur na kun nas zlum zhing yongs su bskor ba’i don du ’jug pas dkyil ’khor zhes bya ste/ (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 [Paro: Lama Ngodrup and Sherab Drimey, 1984-1993], 136. Thanks to Karma Phuntsho for drawing our attention to this source). 22 Helmut Eimer, “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 (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997a), 52. Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 13 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 signiicant presence in Rnying ma collections such as the Transmitted Teachings of the Nyingma Tradition (Rnying ma bka’ ma),23 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.24 They cite different passages, both from chapter two, which deals with the samayas.25 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. 23 No version of the Thabs zhags commentary was included in Dudjom Rinpoche’s Bka’ ma collection. We do not know if it was included in earlier Bka’ ma collections. A copy of the Peking Bstan ’gyur version has been included in the new Bka’ ma shin tu rgyas pa compiled by KaH thog mkhan po ’jams dbangs (Chengdu, 1999), vol. wu (80), 125-236. It has been copied anew for this collection, but it does clearly correspond to the Bstan ’gyur versions of the text, and an additional colophon identiies its provenance: pe cin bstan ’gyur las bthus/ (presumably, btus or ’thus intended), “extracted from the Peking Bstan ’gyur” (vol. wu [80], 236.5). 24 See Rong zom chos kyi bzang po, Rong zom bka’ ’bum [Thimphu: Kunsang Topgay, 1976], 397-398; Klong chen pa, Bdud ’joms bka’ ma, la:63; and G. Dorje, “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], 393). 25 Klong chen pa also cites the root text elsewhere in the Phyogs bcu’i mun sel, passages from chapters one, ive, ten, and from the inal teaching in the Thabs zhags root text, chapter forty-two (Klong chen pa, Bdud ’joms bka’ ma, la:255, 279-280, 445-446, 488-489, 618-619). Rong zom pa refers to the importance of the Thabs zhags (Rong zom pa, Rong zom bka’ ’bum, 490), and he cites from two parts of the root text of chapter one (Rong zom pa, Rong zom bka’ ’bum, 375, 408), also including a further apparent citation (Rong zom pa, Rong zom bka’ ’bum, 392-393) we have not identiied. Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 14 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 briely 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 ive 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,26 surrounded by the Ten Wrathful Deities, or Khro bo bcu. The central female is the great fearsome female deity (’Jigs byed chen mo), speciied 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.27 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 26 Described in A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis (’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padma ’phreng gi don bsdus pa’i ’grel pā), chapter 12: 47r-49v, IOL Tib J 321 (http://idp.bl.uk/database/oo_loader.a4d?pm=IOL%20Tib%20J%20321). 27 See C. Cantwell 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. 28 K. W. Eastman, “Mahāyoga Texts at Tun-huang,” Bulletin of Institute of Buddhist Cultural Studies 22 (1983): 49-52. Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 15 they represent Padmasambhava as author of the commentary.29 In fact, the manuscript has no clear cut colophon at all, beyond giving a scribe’s name. What it does inish with is an enigmatic annotated homage that is not unambiguously identiiable 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 identiied 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 employ some of the doctrinal technical terms associated with another genuinely 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.31 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 Puriication 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).32 The ’Phang thang ma claims he performed the consecration rituals for Bsam yas.33 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 29 A recent article from Sam van Schaik, for example, writes that “the Dunhuang Ms IOL Tib J 321 contains a colophon which states that Padmasambhava was the author of the commentary” (Sam van Schaik, “A Deinition of Mahāyoga,” in Tantric Studies 1 [Hamburg: Center for Tantric Studies, 2008], 47). 30 Our forthcoming book presents the evidence in detail. 31 In general terms, the Thabs zhags tends to more narrowly focus on its own speciic approach to liberation, while the Garland of Views has a wider expository range. Also, unlike the Thabs zhags root tantra, the Garland of Views is written as commentary, in a human voice, rather than the divine voices of scripture. Those technical terms shared by both texts are still widely current in modern Rnying ma literature, which likes to cite the Instructions on the Garland of Views as their ultimate source and which still explains them in very similar terms to the Thabs zhags comnmentary and the Instructions on the Garland of Views. See C. Cantwell 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, ed. José Cabezón (New York: Oxfor University Press, 2010), 79, 87 n. 29. 32 See A. Herrmann-Pfandt, Die lHan kar ma: Ein früher Katalog der ins Tibetische übersetzten buddhistischen Texte (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2008), 177, item 323. Martin ( Ti b s k r i t Philology, Jerusalem, April 2006, http://tibetan-studies-resources.blogspot.com/2006/04/tibskrit-bibliography-of-tibetan.html; entry on Śāntigarbha) notes that Bu ston’s Yogatantra history (135.1, 140.1) lists his works and mentions his Yogatantra explanations, ’Bru ’grel rgan po. 33 rgya gar gyi slob dpon bsam yas kyi rab gnas mkhan shaṃ ting gar bha/ (’Phang thang ma/ dkar chag ’phang thang ma/ sgra sbyor bam po gnyis pa [Beijing: Mi rigs dpe skrun khang, 2003], 2 and front matter plate 2, folio 1v.6-7). Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 16 their Mahāyoga tradition, and several of whom igure quite visibly in the Dunhuang literature.34 In short, this old manuscript adds considerable weight to the evidence for substantial representatives of 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 was cited 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 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 briely describe the transmission of the commentary, and then focus on these prestigious and inluential canonical editions of the root text, the ones that were and still are used by most Tibetan readers, and relect 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.35 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. 34 As far as we are currently aware, without having yet made an exhaustive search, at least ive out of this list of eight masters have turned up so far in various Dunhuang tantric texts: Mañjuśrīmitra in IOL Tib J 331.1, and in IOL Tib J 1774; Prabhahasti seems perhaps to be referred to (as “Pra be se”) in PT 44 (Cantwell and Mayer, Early Tibetan Documents, 60), Padmasambhava in several (PT 44, PT 307, IOL Tib J 321), Śāntigarbha in IOL Tib J 321; Vimalamitra (Bye ma la mu tra, f.1) in IOL Tib J 644 and IOL Tib J 688 (on rosaries); Mañjuśrīmitra, Hūṃkara (and Buddhagupta), in IOL Tib J 1774 (slob pon nī ’bu ta kub ta dang / shī rī man ’ju dang / hung ka ra). 35 It does not, however, survive in the Sde dge or Co ne Bstan ’gyurs. Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 17 Conversely, some much smaller but still signiicant omissions in the Dunhuang text can be recovered from the Bstan ’gyur. The transmission of the root scripture is more complex. It descends in ive 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 ifth 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 in their Ancient Tantra sections.36 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,37 with little more than the pagination varying. 4. Fourthly, there is a version witnessed by all four available Bhutanese Ancient 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 Ancient Tantra 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, and Bruno 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 ive versions of the root text differ from each other, sometimes radically. At irst glance, one might imagine the variation to result from an open tradition, 36 The Rgyal rtse Them spangs ma manuscript, the progenitor of the other main line of Bka’ ’gyur descent, did not have an Ancient Tantra section (Paul Harrison commented, “I would say there is virtually no chance that the text was included in the rGyal rtse Them spangs ma MS Kanjur.” Personal communication, August 6th, 2007; see also Helmut Eimer, “Structure of the Tibetan Kanjur,” in The Many Canons of Tibetan Buddhism, edited by H. Eimer and D. Germano [Leiden: Brill, 2002], 66). Hence the four mixed Bka’ ’gyurs of Snar thang, Sde dge, Lha sa, and Urga, could be predicted also in this case to have relied on exemplars from the Tshal pa Bka’ ’gyur branch, and our collations, demonstrating a close relation between all the Bka’ ’gyur versions, would support that prediction. The case of the Ulan Bator manuscript Bka’ ’gyur is less clear, since this is said to be a Them spangs ma Bka’ ’gyur, yet it also contains an Ancient Tantra section. However, since these texts seem to be identical to the eighteen or nineteen contained in the Tshal pa editions, they might simply be a copy of those, which technically would render the Ulan Bator manuscript a mixed Bka’ ’gyur, rather than a pure Them spangs ma transmission. 37 Samten G. Karmay, Feast of the Morning Light, Senri Ethnological Reports, no. 57 (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 2005), 78, describes the process of making the publisher’s proofs (par yig). 38 Missing from volume ma. Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 18 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 inds 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 inluential 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,39 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,40 leaving major ambiguities.41 We 39 There are several possible scenarios, although only a few likely ones: perhaps a unitary root text irst appeared in Tibet embedded in its commentary, and variation was generated as scribes tried to separate the lemmata from the commentary; or perhaps a unitary root text might have begun life independently, and over time become expanded and contracted through editorial reference to the commentary; or perhaps there was an open tradition in which several differing original root texts interacted over time with each other and with the commentary. We believe only the second of these possibilities is at all likely. 40 The exact original extent of the highlighting is uncertain. In some cases, the wash may originally have been applied, but later vanished. There are also other cases where it has seeped through the page, so that some text on the reverse side mistakenly appears to have been highlighted (although this is mostly a problem only for modern readers of the digital images, since this feature is clearer when reading the actual document). 41 Sometimes, text that would clearly appear to be part of the root text, and is so indicated by the phrasing of the text, is not highlighted, and the dissolution of the wash cannot explain all such examples. More rarely, text which is not found in any of our extant root texts is highlighted. Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 19 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. Reproduced by kind permission of The British Library. IOL Tib J 321, folios 42v-43r. Reproduced by kind permission of The British Library. - - IOL Tib J 321, folios 43v-44r. Reproduced by kind permission of The British Library. IOL Tib J 321, folios 44v-45r. 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 Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 20 that they alone constitute root text.42 Then, if you look at Transcription B, you will see that more than ive 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 justiications 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 irst 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 appearances alone perfectly well be either root text or commentarial meditative 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 42 An element of uncertainty remains, since very occasionally, the manuscript highlights words or phrases that it clearly does not recognise as root text – for instance, a few citations of other texts are highlighted. Furthermore, we are considering the possibility that for areas where the commentary merely reproduces root text, the manuscript may be satisied with highlighting the opening words or otherwise leaving long passages of root text unhighlighted. In this case, however, the coincidence of the South Central Tibetan and ’Ba’ thang versions agreeing with the manuscript’s highlighted words suggests that the manuscript correctly identiied the root text. Moreover, there is no other part of the manuscript where mantras are singled out for highlighting. Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 21 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 ind this for example within the Phur pa bcu gnyis), and there is no inherent reason why a divine igure 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 conident 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 irst part of the inal chapter.43 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.44 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 speciic 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 deinition of the root texts’ boundaries has been quite undecided over the last one thousand years. At least ive different decisions about it survive in the extant literature, and we have no idea how many others might have existed in the past.45 43 Equivalent to the irst part of the inal unlabelled chapter in the Dunhuang manuscript version. 44 Note that in contrast, in chapter seven, the Bhutanese version accepts strings of mantra syllables given in the commentary (unhighlighted in the Dunhuang manuscript) in its version of the root text, where the Tshal pa Bka’ ’gyur, the ’Ba’ thang Bka’ ’gyur, and South Central Ancient Tantra Collection versions do not include them (the Hemis Bka’ ’gyur is missing this section through folio loss). 45 In addition to the decisions represented by the three groupings of root text versions, we can add the commentary’s implicit marking of lemmata by its wording in some parts of the text, together with its apparent failure to mark off the lemmata in other parts of the text (making its assessment of the boundaries uncertain in these areas of the text). Finally, we have the added layer of the Dunhuang manuscript’s version of the commentary with its highlighting, apparently clarifying the commentary’s assessment, but in fact, still leaving some uncertainty, and apparently underestimating the extent of the root text, in comparison with the three surviving root text versions. Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 22 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 ix the fuzzy boundaries without the beneit of stemmatics. The text of the Thabs zhags root tantra remains singularly dificult to separate from its commentary to this day and probably would have always remained so, without the beneit of modern stemmatic analysis. Concluding Relections In previous studies, we have looked at how what may seem signiicant 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).46 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.47 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 suficiently explored. Institutionally speaking, Rnying ma tantric culture was a world of shifting decentralized religious authority, where no single body could establish a text deinitive 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.48 In common with much traditional 46 C. Cantwell, “Variations in Tibetan Buddhist Meditations on Deities: Relections on the Process of Generating Practices,” Unpublished paper presented to the UK Association for Buddhist Studies Conference: Buddhism and Popular Culture, Lancaster, July 2006. Rather more radical variation has since been generated within English language sources presenting the Bdud ’joms gter gsar sngon ’gro practices, since interpretations of the terse instructions have greatly varied. 47 See note 2, and on the speciic variant of the homophones, sgo/go in the irst root verse, see Mayer, A Scripture, 213-216. 48 The popular perception that a manuscript tradition must necessarily generate more variation than a printed tradition is frequently overstated. The Masoretic Bible was exclusively a manuscript tradition for many centuries before the age of print, yet famously succeeded in eliminating variation through the application of ingeniously simple traditional methods of alphabetic and verbal calculations, so that Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 23 Buddhist scholasticism, it was also a world characterized by prodigious feats of memory, resulting in complex ongoing interactions between 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 igure of the “tradent” that has been so brilliant analyzed in recent Talmudic scholarship. In such a world of de facto ongoing collective authorship, existing fragments or building blocks of holy dharma, blessed through their usage by many previous generations of masters, are typically re-inlected, re-anthologized, and rearranged by learned bla mas to suit the needs of their contemporary audiences. This has two implications: irstly, 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 its better. Secondly, the notion of a ixed 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.49 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 signiicant 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 [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: signiicant 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 ind 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. 49 Gter ma its this description very well. To give one extremely simple example, the version of Bdud ’joms gling pa’s (1835-1904) fulillment liturgy (bskang ba) for Vajrakīlaya which his reincarnation Bdud ’joms rin po che (1904-1987) edited makes one very small yet potent textual change, which has Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 24 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 identiiable 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.50 Yet in the Ancient Tantra Collection, variation more often takes the form of a mute inscrutable anonymous inheritance from the distant past.51 Our present question is, how might we begin to approach Rnying ma understandings of variation speciically 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 geographically diverse editions, carefully reproduces 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 ive 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). 50 Dudjom Rinpoche’s works in volume pha of his Collected Works on a tantric longevity practice revealed by one of his root gurus, Zil gnon nam mkha’i rdo rje (Bdud ’joms rin po che, The Collected Writings; including his Commentary, bsnyen yig, 431-509; Notes on Ritual Procedures, khrigs zin, 193-208; and Ritual Practice Framework Manual, sgrub khog, 233-296), reproduce historical/mythological and ritual practice material from the Fifteenth Karmapa’s empowerment texts. They also introduce a number of modiications (many related to the Smin grol gling practice traditions which he followed) and his own elaborations (we discuss this at length in our forthcoming book written jointly with Geoffrey Samuel, The Seed of Immortal Life: Contexts and Meanings of a Tibetan Longevity Practice [Kathmandu: Vajra Books]). His texts on the Gnam lcags spu gri cycle of Vajrakīlaya (volumes tha and da of his Collected Works) are said to represent Bdud ’joms gling pa’s original Gter ma revelation, although they are clearly extensively re-written and expanded. 51 We need to distinguish here variation within single texts across different editions and different versions of the same blocks of material across different named scriptures. The focus of this article has been on variation within one text, but the re-presentation of different versions of the same text in different root tantras is even more striking. See Cantwell and Mayer, Early Tibetan Documents, chapters 5-6 (especially p. 76-87 and Appendix to chapter 6) for an example of a text preserved at Dunhuang (IOL Tib J 331.III), the contents of which are largely reproduced in varying sequences in different Ancient Tantra Collection texts. Since publication, we have further identiied the same text within Nyang ral nyi ma ’od zer’s The Eight Scriptural Deities Embodying the Sugatas (Bka’ brgyad bde gshegs ’dus pa) collection. A very different form of variation is evidenced in the apparently jumbled parallel text within the two Ancient Tantra Collection texts of the Myang ’das’s chapter eighteen and the Rdo rje khros pa phur pa rtsa ba’i rgyud’s chapter six (Cantwell and Mayer, The Kīlaya Nirvāṇa Tantra, chapter 2.IV). Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 25 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.52 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 ind 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 Collection is necessarily uniquely complete and valid. In this view, a deinitive 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,53 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. 52 Such coded mantra tables make possible the preservation of mantras, by using numbers to correspond to each Sanskrit letter. The decoded mantras in the Phur pa bcu gnyis’s mantra table appear to relect a corrupt and inconsistent early phonetic rendering in Tibetan, while the mantra list earlier in the text’s Sde dge edition instead gives a more correct representation of Tibetan transliteration of Sanskrit mantras. See the extensive discussion in Mayer, A Scripture, 135-146. 53 Roger Keesing, Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective (Florida: Harcourt Brace, 1981), 71-72. Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 26 A more recent presentation of the distributive nature of knowledge comes from Fredrik Barth,54 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 irst 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, 54 Fredrik Barth, “An Anthropology of Knowledge,” in Current Anthropology 43, no. 1 (February 2002): 1-18. 55 Barth sees these three faces of knowledge as interconnected, and above all, mutually determining. However, Barth says that to understand his ideas, we need to invert the way we habitually construct analyses. He emphasises that he is not positing a highly generalized and abstract unity called knowledge, which then subdivides into the three parts of substantive corpus, communicative medium, and social organization, which in turn progressively break down further until we inally arrive at the level of particular human actions and events. On the contrary, Barth proposes that these three faces of knowledge appear together precisely in the particulars of action in every actual event of the application of knowledge, in every actual transaction in knowledge, in every actual performance of knowledge. Their mutual determination, says Barth, takes place at those speciic moments when a particular item of substantive knowledge is cast in a particular communicative medium and applied in an action by an actor positioned in a particular social organization. Their systematic interdependence, he says, arises by virtue of the constraints in realization that these three aspects impose on each other in the context of every particular application. Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 27 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 speciic 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 signiicance 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 Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 28 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 mediums for new Buddhavacana, over and above mere learned editing. But religious 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 the many transmissionally and recensionally transformed semantically good readings 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,56 and it also looks quite likely from their shared readings that it was the Sde dge xylograph edition he consulted.57 We also know that this Sde dge edition seems to relect 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.58 From the point of view of stemmatics, this heavily redacted and conlated 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 inluential 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 ixed and timeless utterances of individual Classical authors. With growing scholarly awareness of the luidity of so many Buddhist texts through history, the relevance of stemmatics is sometimes 56 R. Barron, trans., ed., The Autobiography of Jamgön Kongtrul: A Gem of Many Colours (Ithaca, Boulder: Snow Lion, 2003), 282, 286. 57 At least in the speciic case of a seminal commentary on Rdo rje phur pa, a number of his citations from the Myang ’das would suggest this (Cantwell and Mayer, The Kīlaya Nirvāṇa Tantra, 50-52). Kong sprul also refers (Barron, The Autobiography, 255) to his receipt of the transmission of the twenty-ive volumes of the Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa, which again would seem to indicate Sde dge’s edition. 58 At the authoritative hands of the great Rig ’dzin tshe dbang mchog sgrub, who was not a gter ston, but a vastly inluential author of commentaries on Gter ma and much else. Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 29 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 it 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 stemmatics as 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 luid 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 ind 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 luidity, 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 inds value in stemmatic techniques as a way of recovering both their original archetypes and also signiicant 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. Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 30 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.a4d?pm=IOL%20Tib%20J%20321. Conventions: Highlighted text (ཱཾ་) represents text highlighted in the original with a translucent yellow wash. 1. 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 (|ུ་|) represents deletions. 6. Underlining (སིང་ཧ་ུ་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་ྱོགས་ན་འྲ་མེན་མ་ཀོུ་རེ་ཁ་དོག་ྔོན་མོ་ ྱག་གཉིས་པ་ྟེ ྱག་གཡོན་པ་ཙན་དན་ [line 2] དམར་པོས་བཀང་བ་ཐོགས [line 3] ན གཡས་ཞིང་ུང་ུ་འི་དྱིག་པ་ཐོགས་པ་ྟེ་ ཱཾ་བ་ྲ་ཀོུ་རི་ཱ་ཱ་ཱུ ཞེས་ྟོང་ྩ་བྱད་བླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ སངས་ྱས་ྱང་འུགས་ན *** གཞན་ྟ་ྨོས་ྱང་ཅི་དགོས་ ***** ཆེ་གེ་མོ་ཞིག་ཅེས་བཅོལ་ལ་ ཱཾ་ུ་|ུ་|ུ་ ུ་ུ་ཱུ་ྱོ་ ཞེས་བྗོད་ཅིང་ ཨ་ྒ་ལན་གུམ་ ྷོ་ྱོགས་ན་ེུ་རི་ཁ་དོག་སེར་མོ་ ྱག་ན་མདའ་གུ་འགེངས་པ ཱཾ་བ་ྲ་ོུ་རི་ཱུ་འཱ ཞེས་ྟོང་ྩ་བྱད་བླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ [line 4] གཏོར་མ་དང་ཙན་དན་དམར་ཆེན་ྱི་ཨ་*****ྒ་ལ་ [line 5] ྲེང་ངོ་ [below line 5, continuing onto note below line 6] [line 6] ན 59 གདོན་དང་དྲ་འི་གུགས་ྱས་ལ་མདའ་འི བར་བཞག་གམ་གང་ལ་གུག་པའི་ ྱག་ན་ྡོ་ྗེ་འི་མུ་ཡང་ ུལ་ཙམ་ཡང་ྱེད་པར་ུ་ུས་པ་ན་ གཞན་ྟ་ ྨོས་ྱང་ཅི་དགོས་ [below line 6] ྱོགས་ཁ་བྟས་ཏེ་མདའ་འཕངས་ཏེ་ཕོག་ཅིང་གཟིར་ལ་ལ་བདག་ུ་གི་དབང་ུ་འུར་རོ ུབ་ྱོགས་ན་ྲ་མོ་ཧ་དམར་པོ་ [panel 42v] [line 1] ྱག་ན་ུ་[Gt 272] [below line 1, on left] 59 ྲིན་ྱི་ྱལ་མཚན་ཐོགས་པ ཱཾ་བ་ྲ་ྲ་མོ་ཧ་ཱུ་ཛ་ཱ་ཞེས་ྟོང་ྩ་བྱད་བླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན ྱི་བོར་ལ་བྐོར་བར་བསམ [below line 1, on right] ྱག་ན་ྡོ་ྗེ་ཡང་རང་གི་མུ་ ྷ་དང་ྱི་ཡང་བདག་གི་དབང་ུ་འུས་པར་བྒོམ It appears that ུ་ written in error has been deleted; in part, it has been amended into the following ུ་. Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) [line 2] གཞག་ནས་དབང་ུ་འོང་ན་ གཞན་ྟ་ཅྀ་ྨོས་ 60 31 ྱང་ྱོགས་ན་བེ་ཏ་ལི་ཁ་དོག་ནག་པོ ྱག་གཡོན་ན་ཞིང་ུང་ུ་འིན་ཟ་བ་ [line 3] ྱག་གཡས་ན་ྡོ་ྗེ་ྱར ཱཾ་བ་ྲ་བེ་ཏ་*****ལི་ཱུ་ཱ་ཞེས་ྟོང་ྩ་བྱད་བླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་ **** འཇིག་ྟེན་དང་འཇིག་ྟེན་ལས་འདས་ [line 5] ུས་ཀ་སི་དམར་སེར་ ྱག་གཉིས་ཞིང་ུང་ུ་འི་བ་ུ་ཏ་འྲེན་ཅིང་ཟ་བ ཱཾ་བ་ྲ་ུས་ཀ་སི་ཱུ་ཱ་ ཞེས་ྟོང་ྩ་བྱད་བླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ [line 4] པའི་དངོས་ུབ་ཐམས་ཅད་ྱང་ུབ་ན་****** [line 6] ན་ ྱག་ན་ྡོ་ྗེ་ཡང་འཆིང་ཞིང་འྲེན་པར་ུས་ན་ གཞན་ཟ་བར་ྱ་བ་ྟ་ཅི་ྨོས་ [panel 43r] [line 1] ༆ [line 3] མ་ཁ་དོག་ྗང་ུ [line 5] སེར་ྱ་ྱག་གཡས་ན་ [line 6] བཅོལ་ན་ [panel 43v] [line 1] ྱ་བ་ ྱག་ན་ྡོ་ྗེ་ཡང་ྱོས་པར་འུར་ན་ གཞན་ྟ་ྨོས་ྱང་ཅི་དགོས་ ུབ་ྱང་མཚམས་ན་བྲ་ཀར་ ལས་གང་*****ྱ་བ་ཐམས་ཅད་འུབ་བོ་ ྟ་ཅི་ྨོས་ [line 2] ུལ་བཞིན་བྱི ྱང་ཤར་*****ྱི་མཚམས་ན་ ཙན་ཏ་ལི་ཁ་དོག་ ཞིང་ུང་ུ་འི་བན་ད་འིན་ གཡོན་ཞིང་ཉིད་འིན་ ཱཾ་བ་ྲ་ཙན་ད་ལི་ཱུ་ཱ་ ཞེས་ྟོང་ྩ་བྱད་བླས་ཏེ་ འྲ་མེན་མ་འདི་ྣམས་འྲིན་ལས་མཛད་པར་བུལ་བའི་ེ ཨ་ྒ་དང་གཏོར་མ་དུལ་བ་ནི གོང་ུ་ྨོས་པ་བཞིན་ པ ྲོས་ན་ཐམས་ཅད་ྱག་ཆ་ྲིལ་ུ་|ལ|་འབར་བ་ གཡོན་[ྡེ?]ུ་ུང་བྣམས གདན་ྱེ་ུག་གནག་ [line 3] ུ་འི་ཁ་དོག་ནག་མོ་ལ་ ྲག་དང་*****ཞག་དང་ཐལ་བའི་ཐིག་ལེས་ུམ་ུར་ྱས་*****ཤིང་ བ་ུ་ཏས་ྐེད་པར་བཅིངས་ [line 4] གསེར་ྱི་པགས་པ་གོས་ུ་བགོས [line 5] གཡོན་ྡེུ་ུང་བྣམས་ ***** ྲོ་|ན|་ཏ་ཨན་ཱ་ནས་ུས་བྱན་ཏེ་ ***** གཅེར་ུ་འི་ོགས་ུག་གནག་འབར་བ་ གདན་ྱེ་ུག་གནག་ ུ་འི་ཁ་དོག་ནག་མོ་ལ་འཇིག་ྟེན་ཁམས་ཟད་ཅིང་བྲེག་པར་ྱས་ནས་ [line 6] ླར་དཔལ་ཆེན་པོ་འི་ུ་ལ་ཐིམ་པར་ྱ་འོ [panel 44r] ༠ ༠ 62 ད་ནི་ྱི་རིམ་བཤད་པར་ྱ་ྟེ་ ཤར་ྱོགས་ུ་སིང་ཧ་ུ་ཁ་ ཁ་དོག་སེར་མོ་ ཞིང་ཁ་ན་ཐོགས་པ་ ལག་པ་གཡས་གཡོས་བྣོལ་པ་སེང་གེ་འི་མགོ་ཅན་ ལག་པ་གཉིས་བྣོལ་ཏེ་མུན་ངན་ཞིང་གནས་པ་ལ་ྟ་བ་ྟག་ྱི་མགོ་ཅན་ [line 3] ལག་པ་གཉིས་ྱིས་[Gt 274] ཞིང་ུང་ུ་འིན་*****ཅིང་ྕེས་ྡག་པ་ [line 4] ཁ་དོག་མཐིང་ཀ་ལག་པ་གཉིས་*****ྱིས་ཁོང་ྲལ་ཏེ་ྟ་བ་ [line 5] དོག་དམར་གནག་ [panel 44v] [line 2] མུས་ཞིང་ཐོགས་པ་ ུབ་ྱོགས་ན་ྲི་ཁ་ ཁ་དོག་ནག་མོ་ ཝ་ མགོ་ཅན **** ྱང་ྱོགས་ན་ྭ་ན་ུ་ཱ 64 ྱི་མགོ་ཅན་***** ཤར་ྷོ་འི་མཚམས་ན་ྲི་ཏ་ཁ་ ྱ་བཀང་ཀ་འི་འགོ་ལ་མུ་རིང ཐོར་ཏོ་ུག་ཟེ་བ་དམར ུབ་ྱང་གི་མཚམས་ན ཀ་ཀ་ཁ་དོག་ནག་མོ་ ལག་པ་གཡོན་བས་པད་མོ་བན་དྷ་འིན ྱ་རོག་མགོ་ཅན་ ྱང་ཤར་ྱི་མཚམས་ུ་ུ་ུ་ཁ་དོག་ྣ་ོགས་ [line 4] ནང་རིམ་ུག་པའི་འཁོར་གིས་བྐོར་***** [line 5] རིངས་ྱི་འཁོར་ྱིས་བྐོར་ 62 གཡས་ྡོ་ྗེ་ྕགས་ུ་*****འིན ུག་པའི་མགོ་ཅན་ དེ་འི་ྱི་རིམ་ྱ་རོག་གི་འཁོར་གིས་*****བྐོར་ 64 དེ་འི་རིམ་ཀང་ཀ་མུ་ དེ་འི་ྱི་རིམ་ྱ་ྒོད་ྱི་འཁོར་ྱིས་བྐོར་ དེ་དག་ཐམས་ཅད་ྱང་ཞིང་མང་པོ་གསར་ྙིང་ུངས་པའི་ ཅྀ་ is added in small writing as a correction, below the line. ྱ་བ་ྱ་བ་: dittography at the turn of the folio. Here we find two punctuation marks, each of a small circle positioned in the middle of the line, and evenly placed between separating shads. 63 63 ཞིང་ུང་ུ་འི་བ་ུ་ཏ་ཁ་ན་ཐོགས་པ་ ལག་པ་གཡས་པ་ན་བན་དྷ་ གཡོན་ྲི་ཐོགས་པ་ ྱ་ྒོད་མགོ་ [line 3] ལག་པ་གཡོན་པ་ུང་ཅེན་ྲག་གིས་གང་****བ་ལ་འུང་བ་ 60 ྷོ་ྱོགས་ན་ྱ་ྲ་ུ་ཁ་ ཁ་དོག་དམར་ ྷོ་ུབ་མཚམས་ན་ཀང་ཀ ཁ་དོག་དཀར་དམར་ ྲག་པ་གཡོན་པ་ན་ཞིང་ཁེལ་ཞིང་ྐང་པ་ནས་བུང་བ་ [line 1] གཡས་པ་མགོ་འིན 61 ཱཾ་བ་ྲ་ཀར་མ་ཱུ་ཱ་ ཞེས་ྟོང་ྩ་ ཟ་མ་[Gt 273] དང་མ་ནིང་ལ་ཡང་ུད་འཕེལ་བར་ྱེད་ན་ དབང་པོ་ཚང་ཞིང་ཉམས་པ་ྱེད་པ་ ེ་དང་དབང་ཐང་འཕེལ་བར་ྱ་བ་ 61 [line 6] ཅན ྷོ་ུབ་ྱི་མཚམས་ན་ ཀས་མ་ལི་ ཞིང་ུང་ུ་ལག་པ་*****གཉིས་ྱིས་བུང་ྟེ་ྙིང་ཁ་ནས་ཟ་བ་ [line 4] བྱད་བླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་ [line 2] མོ་ ཤར་ྷོ་འི་མཚམས་ན་ ཁ་དོག་ྗང་ུ་ ྱག་གཡོན་པ་ན་བན་ད་ཙན་དན་དམར་པོས་བཀང་ྟེ་ྡོ་ྗེས་དུག་ཅིང་འུང་བ་ ཱཾ་བ་ྲ་ཀས་མ་རི་ཱུ་ཱ་ [line 2] ཞེས་ྟོང་ྩ་བྱད་བླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་ [line 1] ༆ འཇིག་ྟེན་ྱི་བུབ་པ་ྲན་ེགས་ྟ་******ཅི་ྨོས་ 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. Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis [line 6] ྟེང་ུ་ ཞིང་ལ་ྟོད་པའི་ྱིར་འཐབ་པའི་ུལ་ྟོན་པ་ཤེ་དག་གོ་ [panel 45r] [line 1] ༆ འདི་ུན་འུ་རེ་རེ་ཡང་ལན་བཞྀ་བཞི་བྗོད་དོ་ [line 2] མོ་བཞི་བྱེད་ [line 3] ྱབ་པར་བྱི་འོ་ ཕཊ་ྱིས་ཐམས་ཅད་ྲོ་བར་བུལ་ དེ་དག་གི་ྙིང་པོ་ནི་[Gt 275]འདི་ྣམས་སོ་ ུང་གིས་གོ་བོས་བྱེད་ 32 ཱུ ཧ ཧེ ཕཊ ཱུ་ ཧས་ནང་གི་ྷ་མོ་བཞི་བྱེད་ ཧེ་ྱི་འི་ྷ་ ཱུ་ྱིས་ཐམས་ཅད་ཡེ་ཤེས་ྱི་འོད་གསེར་འབར་བས་ྱོགས་བུར་ 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. 2. 3. 4. 5. R = Rig ’dzin volume dza, 187r.2-3 (second half of the eighteenth century?) T = Gting skyes volume dza, 205r.5-6 (first half of the nineteenth century, perhaps around 1830?) K = Kathmandu ms. volume ma, *329v.1-2 (perhaps nineteenth century?) The relevant volume of the Nubri manuscript is missing. Bth = Bathang Bka' 'gyur volume rgyud a, 209v.5-6. ཨཾ་བྲ་ཀེ་ུ་ཛ་ཛ་ཱུ 65 ཨཾ་ུ་ུ་ུ་ུ་ཱུ་ྱོ་ཱུ ཨཾ་བྲ་ེུ་རི་ ཱུ་ཛ 68 ཨཾ་བྲ་ྲ་མོ་ཧ་ཱུ་ཛ ཨཾ་བྲ་པེ་ཏ་ལི་ཱུ་ཛ ཨཾ་བྲ་ུ་ཀ་སི་ཱུ་ཛ 67 69 70 71 ཨཾ་བྲ་ཀྲི་ར་ ཱུ་ཛ 72 ཨཾ་བྲ་ྨ་ཤ་ནི་ ཱུ་ཛ 74 65 66 73 75 The two double shads found in RT indicate a break in the text. In K, the tshig rkang is damaged and largely illegible. 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 oṃ badzra ke ru dza dza hūṃ/; Bth, oṃ badzra klu re dza dza hūṃ/. oṃ ru lu ru lu hūṃ bhyo hūṃ/: Bth oṃ ra lu ra lu hūṃ bhyo hūṃ/ ེུ་རི་: K ིུ་རི་. oṃ badzra tse'u ri hūṃ dza/: Bth oṃ badzra tsu ri hūṃ dza/ oṃ badzra pra mo ha hūṃ dza/ oṃ badzra pe ta li hūṃ dza/: Bth omits oṃ badzra pu ka si hūṃ dza: Bth oṃ badzra pu ka si hāṃ dza ཀྲི་ར་: T ཀ་ྲི་ར་; K ཀ་ྨི་ར་. oṃ badzra kasmri ra hūṃ dza: Bth oṃ badzra pa smra ra haṃ dza ྨ་ཤ་ནི་: T ྲ་ཤ་ནི་ (Note that this reading, shared with the Batang’Ba’ thang KangyurBka’ ’gyur, is correct, while the reading, karma, appears to be an error shared by the Dunhuang manuscript, the TselpaTshal pa KangyurBka’ ’gyur and Bhutan). 75 oṃ badzra sma sha ni hūṃ dza: Bth oṃ badzra [ba?] sha ni hāṃ dza Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) ཨཾ་བྲ་ཙན་ད་ལི་ཱུ་ཛ ཱུ་ཧེ་ཧེ་ཕཊ་ཱུ 77 33 76 78 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. 2. 3. 4. Ga = Sgang steng-a volume wa, 58r.3-6 Gb = Sgang steng-b volume wa, 58v.3-5 Gr = Sgra med rtse volume wa, 53r.3-5 M = Mtshams brag volume wa, 70r.2-3 ཨཾ་བྲ་ཀཽ་རི་ྲ་ྲ་ ཱུ 79 ཨཾ་ུ་ུ་ུ་ུ་ཱུ་ྱོ ཨཾ་བྲ་ོུ་ རི་ཱུ་ ཛ 80 81 ཨཾ་བྲ་ྲ་མོ་ཧ་ཱུ་ཛ ཨཾ་བྲ་བེ་ ཏ་ལི་ཱུ་ཛ 82 ཨཾ་བྲ་ཱུ་ཀ་སི་ཱུ་ཛ ཨཾ་བྲ་གྷྨ་རི་ཱུ་ཛ ཨཾ་བྲ་ཀྨཱ་ ཱུ་ཛ 83 ཨཾ་བྲ་ཙྜ་ལི་ཱུ་ཛ སིྒ་ུ་ཛ 84 ྱ་ྲི་ུ་ཁ 76 oṃ badzra tsan da li hūṃ dza: in K, this tshig rkang is damaged and partly illegible; Bth, oṃ badzra tsan da le hūṃ dza. 77 TRK insert: ལས་ྣམས་. We are not clear how to account for these words, which are not given in Bth. It is conceivable they derive from the words used above to introduce this section: འྲ་མེན་མ་འདི་ྣམས་འྲིན་ལས་མཛད་པར་. 78 79 80 81 hūṃ he he phaṭ hūṃ/; Bth, hāṃ he he phaṭ hāṃ/. ྲ་ྲ་: Gr ཛ་ཛ་. ོུ་: Gr ཽ་. M ཱུ་ (and similarly in some of the following mantras, or giving ཧ་ in place of ཧ་). The several modern re-editions of Mtshams brag available today all stem from a single photo-offset litho reproduction made in the 1980s. Here, and on six further occasions within in this short passage, these modern reproductions lose anusvara, thus rendering ཱུ་ in place of ཱུྃ་, or ཧ་ in place of ཧ་. It is not yet clear if this results from the modern reproduction processes or if it was a feature of the original manuscript. 82 83 84 བེ་: Gr པེ་. ཀྨཱ་: Gr ཀྨ་. ཛ་: Gr ཁ་. Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 34 ྲི་ ཀ་ུ་ཁ 85 ཱ་ ན་ུ་ཀ 86 ྲི་ཏ་ུ་ཀ ཀྐ་ུ་ཀ ཱ་ཁ་ུ་ཀ ཱུ་ུ་ཀ་ུ་ཁ ཱུ་ཧ་ཧེ་ཕཊ་ཱུ 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. 2. Dk = Sde dge Bka’ ’gyur, Ancient Tantra (Rnying rgyud), kha (102):607.3-609.7 D = Sde dge Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa (Rnying ma’i rgyud ’bum), pa:291r.3-92r.7 Ms = Dunhuang manuscript, IOL Tib J 321 3. Bold (ཨཾ་) has been added to indicate text which is highlighted in the Dunhuang 4. manuscript. [panel Dk607/D291r] [line 3] ཤར་ྱོགས་ན་ྲ་མེན་མ་ཀཽ་རི་ཁ་དོག་ྔོན་མོ་ྱག་གཉིས་པ་ྟེ [line 4] ཙྡན་དམར་ྱིས་བཀང་བ་ཐོགས་པ གཡོན་བྷན་དྷ་ གཡས་ན་ཞིང་ུང་ུའི་དུག་པ་ཐོགས་པ ཨཾ་བྲ་གཽ་ཱི་ཛ ་ཛ ་ཱུ་ཞེས་ྟོང་ྩ་བྱད་བླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་ སངས་ྱས་ྱང་དུག་ུས་ན་གཞན་ྟ་ཅི་ྨོས ཆེ་གེ་མོ་ཞིག་ུག་ཅིག་ཅེས་བཅོལ་ [line 5] ནས་གཏོར་མ་དང་ཙྡན་དམར་ཆེན་ཨྒྷ་ལ་ ཨཾ་ུ་ུ་ུ་ུ་ཱུ་ྱོ་ཞེས་བྗོད་ཅིང་ཨྒྷ་ལན་གུམ་ུ་བྲེང་ངོ་ ྱག་ན་མདའ་གུ་འགེངས་པ ཨཾ་བྲ་ཽ་ཱི་ཱུ་ཛ ་ཞེས་ྟོང་ྩ་བྱད་བཅོལ་ན་ྱག་ན་ྡོ་ [line 6] ྗེའ་ི མུ་ཡང་ུལ་ཙམ་ཡང་མེད་པར་ུ་ུས་ན་གཞན་ྟ་ཅི་ྨོས ཐོགས་པ ྷོ་ྱོགས་ན་ཽ་རི་ཁ་དོག་སེར་མོ་ ུབ་ྱོགས་ན་ྲ་མོ་ཧ་དམར་མོ་ [Ms 42v] ྱག་ན་ུ་ྲིན་ྱི་ྱལ་མཚན་ ཨཾ་བྲ་ྲ་མོ་ཧ་ཱུ་ཛ ་ཞེས་ྟོང་ྩ་བྱད་བླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་ྱག་ན་ྡོ་ྗེ་ཡང་རང་གི་མུ་བཞག་ནས་དབང་ུ་ [line 7] འོང་ན་གཞན་ྟ་ཅི་ྨོས ྱང་ྱོགས་ན་བཻ་ྟ་ལི་ཁ་དོག་ནག་མོ་ྱག་གཡོན་ཞིང་ུང་ུ་འིན་ཅིང་ཟ་བ གཡས་ན་ྡོ་ྗེ་འྱར་བ ཨཾ་བྲ་བཻ་ྟ་ལི་ ཱུ་ཛ ་ཞེས་ྟོང་ྩ་བྱད་བླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་འཇིག་ྟེན་དང་འཇིག་ྟེན་ལས་འདས་པའི་དངོས་ུབ་ཐམས་ཅད་ [panel Dk608/D291v] [line 1] ྱང་འུབ་ན་ འཇིག་ྟེན་ྱི་བུབ་པ་ྲན་ེགས་ྟ་ཅི་ྨོས ཤར་ྷོའ་ི མཚམས་ན་ུྐ་སི་ཁ་ དོག་དམར་སེར་ྱག་གཉིས་ཞིང་ུང་ུའི་བ་ ུ་ཏ་འྲེན་ཅིང་ཟ་བ ཨཾ་བྲ་ུྐ་སི་ཱུ་ཛ ་ཞེས་ྟོང་ྩ་བྱད་བླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་ྱག་ན་ྡོ་ྗེ་ཡང་འཆིང་ཞིང་ 85 86 ྲི་: Gr སི་. ཱ་: Gr ྭ་. Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) [line 2] འྲེན་པར་ུས་ན་གཞན་བཅིང་ཞིང་ཟ་བ་ྟ་ཅི་ྨོས 35 ྷོ་ུབ་ྱི་མཚམས་ན་གྷྨ་རི་ [Ms 43r] ཁ་དོག་ྗང་ུ་ྱག་གཡོན་ན་བྷན་དྷ་ ཙྡན་དམར་པོས་བཀང་བ་ྡོ་ྗེས་དུག་ཅིང་གསོལ་བ ཨཾ་བྲ་གྷྨ་རི་ཱུ་ཛ ་ཞེས་ྟོང་ྩ་བྱད་བླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་ྱག་ན [line 3] ྡོ་ྗེ་ཡང་ ྱོས་པར་ུས་ན་གཞན་ྟ་ྨོས་ྱང་ཅི་དགོས ུབ་ྱང་གི་མཚམས་ན་བྲ་ཀྨ་ཁ་དོག་ྗང་ུ་ཞིང་ུང་ུ་ལག་པ་གཉིས་ྱིས་ བུང་ྟེ་ྙིང་ག་ནས་ཟ་བ ཨཾ་བྲ་ཀྨ་ཱུ་ཛ ་ཞེས་ྟོང་ྩ་བྱད་བླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་ལས་གང་ྱ་བ་ཐམས་ཅད་ [line 4] འུབ་བོ ྱང་ཤར་ྱི་མཚམས་ན་ཙྜ་ལི་ཁ་དོག་སེར་ྱ་ྱག་གཡས་ན་ཞིང་ུང་ུའི་བྷྡྷ་འིན་པ གཡོན་ྱིས་ཞིང་དུག་འིན་ པ ཨཾ་བྲ་ཙྜ་ལི་ཱུ་ཛ ་ཞེས་ྟོང་ྩ་བྱད་བླས་ཏེ་བཅོལ་ན་ཟ་མ་དང་མ་ནིང་ཡང་ུད་འཕེལ་བར་ྱེད་ན་དབང་པོ་ [line 5] ཚང་ཞིང་ཉམས་པ་མེད་པ་ལ་ུད་འཕེལ་ཞིང་ེ་དང་དབང་ཐང་འཕེལ་བར་ྱ་བ་ [Ms 43v] ལས་ུལ་བའི་ེ་ཨྒྷ་དང་གཏོར་མ་དུལ་བ་ནི་གོང་ ུ་ྨོས་པ་བཞིན་ུ་བྱིའོ [line 6] ྡེུ་ུང་ ྟ་ཅི་ྨོས་ ཏེ ྲ་མེན་མ་འདི་ྣམས་ྲིན་ ྲོས་ན་ཐམས་ཅད་ྱག་ན་ྲི་ཱུ་ལ་འབར་བ གཡོན་ བྣམས་པ གདན་མེ་ུག་ནག ུའི་ཁ་དོག་ནག་མོ་ལ་ྲག་དང་ཞག་དང་ཐལ་བའི་ཐིག་ ལེས་ོམ་ུར་ྱས་ཤིང་བ་ུ་ཏས་ ྐེད་པ་བཅིངས་པ གསེར་ྱི་པགས་པ་གོ་ུར་བགོས་ པ་ྲོད་ཏ་ཨ་ཛ་ནས་ུས་བྱན་ཏེ་གཅེར་ུའི་ོགས་ུག་ [line 7] གནག་འབར་ བ གཡོན་ྡེུ་ུང་བྣམས་པ གཡས་མེ་ུག་ུན་ཀ་ཁ་དོག་ནག་མོ་ལ་འཇིག་ྟེན་ ྱི་ཁམས་བྲེགས་ཤིང ཟད་པར་ ྱས་ནས་ླར་དཔལ་ཆེན་པོའ་ི ུ་ལ་ཐིམ་པར་ྱའོ [panel Dk609/D292r] [line 1] དོག་སེར་མོ་ [Ms 44r] དེ་ནི་ྱི་རིམ་བཤད་པར་ྱའོ ཤར་ྱོགས་ུ་སིྷ་ུ་ཁ་ཁ་ ཞིང་ུང་ཁ་ ན་ཐོགས་པ ལག་པ་གཡས་གཡོན་བྣོལ་བ སིང་གེའ་ི མགོ་ཅན ྷོ་ྱོགས་ན་ྱ་ྲི་ ུ་ ཁ་ཁ་དོག་དམར་མོ་ལག་པ་གཉིས་བྣོལ་ཏེ་མུན་ན་ཞིང་གནས་པ་ལ་ྟ་བ ྟག་གི་ མགོ་ཅན་ུབ་ [line 2] ྱོགས་ུ་ ྲིན་ླ་ུ་ཁ་ཁ་དོག་ནག་མོ་ལག་པ་གཉིས་ཞིང་ུང་ུ་འིན་ཅིང་ྕེས་ྡག་པ་ཝ་མགོ་ ཅན ྱང་ྱོགས་ན་ྭ་ན་ུ་ཁ་ཁ་དོག་ མཐིང་ག་ཞིང་ལག་པ་གཉིས་ྱིས་ཁོང་ྲལ་ཏེ་ྟ་ བ་ྱི་མགོ་ཅན ཤར་ྷོའ་ི མཚམས་ུ་ྲྀཌྷ་ུ་ཁ་ཁ་ [line 3] དོག་དམར་གནག་ ཞིང་ུང་ུའི་བ་ུ་ཏ་ཁ་ན་ཐོགས་པ ལག་པ་གཡས་བྷན་དྷ་གཡོན་ྲི་ཐོགས་པ་ྱ་ ྒོད་ྱི་མགོ་ཅན ྷོ་ུབ་ མཚམས་ན་ཀྐ་ུ་ཁ་ཁ་དོག་དཀར་དམར་ྲག་པ་གཡོན་པ་ལ་ ཞིང་ཁེལ་ཞིང་ྐང་པ་ནས་བུང་བ [Ms 44v] གཡས་པ་ [line 4] མགོ་འིན་ པ ྱ་ཀྐའི་མགོ་ཅན་མུ་རིང་ཐོར་ཏོ་ུག་ཟེ་བ་དམར་མོ ུབ་ྱང་མཚམས་ན་ཱ་ཀ་ ུ་ཁ་ཁ་དོག་ནག་མོ མགོ་ཅན་མུས་ཞིང་ཐོགས་པ ལག་པ་གཡོན་བས་པྨ་ བྷན་དྷ་འིན་པ ྱང་ཤར་མཚམས་ུ་ཱུ་ཱུ་ཀ་ [line 5] ུ་ཁ་ཁ་དོག་ྣ་ ྱ་རོག་གི་ ོགས་ལག་པ་གཡོན་པ་ུང་ཆེན་ྲག་གིས་བཀང་བ་ལ་འུང་བ་ལ་གཡས་པ་ྡོ་ྗེ་ྕགས་ ུ་འིན་པ ུག་པའི་མགོ་ ཅན ནང་རིམ་ུག་པའི་འཁོར་ྱིས་བྐོར དེ་འི་ྱི་ རིམ་ྱ་རོག་གི་འཁོར་ྱིས་བྐོར དེ་འི་ྱི་རིམ་ྱ་ཀང་ཀ་མུ་ [line 6] རིངས་ྱི་ འཁོར་ྱིས་བྐོར དེའ་ི ྱི་རིམ་ྱ་ྒོད་ྱི་འཁོར་ྱིས་བྐོར དེ་དག་ཐམས་ ཅད་ྱང་ཞིང་མང་པོ་གསར་ྙིང་ུངས་པའི་ྟེང་ ན་ཞིང་ལ་ྟོད་པའི་ྱིར་འཐབ་པའི་ ུལ་ྟོན་པ་ཤ་ྟག་གོ [line 7] ུན་འུ་རེ་རེ་ཡང་ལན་བཞི་བཞི་བྗོད་དོ དེ་དག་གི་ྙིང་པོ་འདི་ྣམས་སོ ཱུ་ཧ་ཧེ་ཕཊ་ཱུ [Ms 45r] འདི་ ཱུ་གིས་གོ་བོ་བྱེད ཧས་ནང་གི་ྷ་མོ་བྱེད ཧེས་ྱིའ་ི ྷ་མོ་བྱེད ཕཊ་ྱིས་ཐམས་ ཅད་ྲོས་པར་བུལ ཱུ་གིས་ཐམས་ཅད་ྱི་ཡེ་ཤེས་ྱི་འོད་ཟེར་འབར་བས་ྱོགས་བུར་ྱབ་པར་བྱིའོ Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 36 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. Ka Wylie Phonetics English Other Dates Type kaḥ thog Katok kong sprul Kongtrül kyang kyang klong chen pa Longchenpa dkar chag Karchak Contents List Text dkyil kyil center Term dkyil ’khor kyilkhor bka’ brgyad bde gshegs ’dus pa Kagyé Deshek Düpa The Eight Scriptural Deities Embodying the Sugatas (a revelation of Nyang ral nyi ma ’od zer) bka’ ’gyur Kangyur Canonical collection of the Buddhas’ Teachings, shared by all Tibetan Buddhist schools Textual Collection bskang ba kangwa fulillment liturgy Term Phonetics English Place Person also Term Person San. maṇḍala Term Textual Collection Kha Wylie Other Dates khri srong lde’u btsan Tri Songdeutsen Type Person khrigs zin trikzin notes on (ritual) procedures Term khro bo bcu Trowochu Ten Wrathful Deities Buddhist deity ’khor khor circle Term ’khyog khyok bent Term Wylie Phonetics English go go place gor shar gorshar arising at the place Ga grags pa rgyal mtshan Drakpa Gyentsen dga’ ldan Ganden mgyogs gyok ’gos lhas btsas Gö Lhatsé Other Dates Type Term Term 1147-1216 Person Place swift Term ca. 1050 Person Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) rgyal rtse Gyantsé rgyud Gyü rgyud ’bum Gyübum 37 Place San. Tantra Doxographical Category Tantra Collection Doxographical Category rgyud gsang ba snying Gyü Sangwa Nyingpo Secret Essence Tantra po Text sgang steng Gangteng Place sgo go door Term sgor shar gorshar arising at the door Term sgra med rtse Drametsé sgrub khog drupkhok ritual practice framework manual Term bsgyur ba gnyis don ni gong du bshad pa dang ’dra’o gyurwa nyidönni gongdu shepa dang drao they are two (different) translations, but the meaning (of the second) is the same as (the irst), explained above Term Phonetics Place Nga Wylie English Other ngan song Ngensong Tamché thams cad yongs su Yongsu Jongwa sbyong ba gzi brjid Zijikyi Gyelpö Takpa kyi rgyal po’i brtag pa Total Puriication of All Evil Existences, the King of Splendour San. Sarva-durgatipariśodhanatejorājasya-kalpa sngags btu ba ngak tuwa coded mantra table San. mantroddhāra Wylie Phonetics English ’chi med srog thig Chimé Soktik Immortal Life’s Creative Seed Dates Type Text Term Cha Other Dates Type Text chos rgyal ’phags pa Chögyel Pakpa 1235-1280 Person Ja Wylie Phonetics ’jang sa tham Jangsa Tam English Other ’jigs med gling pa 1813-1899 Person Jamgön Mipam ’jigs bral ye shes rdo Jikdrel Yeshé Dorjé rje Type Place ’jam mgon kong sprul Jamgön Kongtrül Lodrö Tayé blo gros mtha’ yas ’jam mgon mi pham Dates 1846-1912 Person Dudjom Rinpoche 1904-1987 Person Jikmé Lingpa 1729-1798 Person Nya Wylie Phonetics English nyang ral nyi ma ’od Nyangrel Nyima Özer zer Other Dates Type 1124-1192 Person mnyam pa nyid nyampanyi evenness/sameness Term rnying rgyud Nyinggyü Ancient Tantra (section) Doxographical Category Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 38 rnying ma Nyingma Ancient (Tradition) Organization rnying ma bka’ ma Nyingma Kama Transmitted Teachings of the Nyingma Tradition Textual Collection rnying ma rgyud ’bum Nyingma Gyübum (Tsamdrak Gönpé (mtshams brag dgon Drima) pa’i bris ma) The Mtshams brag Manuscript of the Rñiṅ ma rgyud ’bum (rgyud ’bum/ mtshams brag dgon pa) Text rnying ma pa Nyingmapa Followers of the Ancient Tradition Organization rnying ma’i rgyud ’bum Nyingmé Gyübum Ancient Tantra Collection of the Rnying ma pa Textual Collection bsnyen yig nyenyik Term Ta Wylie Phonetics gting skyes Tingkyé English Other Dates Type gter ston tertön visionary revealer Term gter ma Terma “Treasure” Revelation Doxographical Category bstan ’gyur Tengyur Canonical collection of commentarial writings on the Buddhas’ Teachings, shared by all Tibetan Buddhist schools Textual Collection Phonetics English Place Tha Wylie Other Dates Type Tapkyi Zhakpa Pema thabs kyi zhags pa pad ma ’phreng ba Trengwagi Dön Düpé Drelpa gi don bsdus pa’i ’grel pa’ The Commentary on “A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis” Text thabs zhags Tapzhak Noose of Methods Text thig le tiklé creative seed or drop Term thigs pa tikpa falling seed or drop Term them spangs ma Tempangma Place Da Wylie Phonetics English bdud ’joms Düjom Dudjom Other Dates Type Name bdud ’joms bka’ ma Düjom Kama Collection of Transmitted Teachings published by Düjom Rinpoché (Bdud-’Joms ’Jigs-bral-ye-śes-rdo-rje) Textual Collection Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) bdud ’joms gling pa Düjom Lingpa 1835-1904 Person bdud ’joms ’jigs bral Düjom Jikdrel Yeshé Collected Works of Dorjé Sungbum Düjom Jikdrel ye Yeshé Dorjé shes rdo rje’i gsung ’bum bdud ’joms gter gsar Düjom Tersar sngon ’gro Ngöndro Textual Collection The Düjom New Treasure Foundation Practice Text bdud ’joms rin po che Düjom Rinpoché Jikdrel Yeshé Dorjé ’jigs bral ye shes rdo rje rdo rje khros pa phur Dorjé Tröpa Purpa pa rtsa ba’i Tsawé Gyü rgyud 39 1904-1987 Person The Vajra Wrath, Root Vajrakīlaya Tantra Text rdo rje phur pa Dorjé Purpa San. Vajrakīlaya rdo rje phur pa rtsa ba’i rgyud kyi dum bu Dorjé Purpa Tsawé Gyükyi Dumbu The Fragment of the Vajrakīlaya Root Tantra Text rdo rje phur bu chos thams cad mya ngan las ’das pa’i rgyud chen po Dorjé Purbu Chö Tamché Nyangenlé Depé Gyü Chenpo The Great Vajrakīlaya Tantra for the Nirvāṇa of All Dharmas Text ldan dkar ma Denkarma See lhan kar ma Text sde dge Degé Place sde dge par khang Degé Parkhang Publisher Buddhist deity Na Wylie Phonetics English gnam lcags spu gri Namchak Pudri Meteoric Iron Razor cycle of Vajrakīlaya texts of the Düjom tradition snar thang Nartang Other Dates Type Text Place Pa Wylie Phonetics padma gling pa Pema Lingpa English padma’i rnam rol bdud ’joms gling pa’i skor nye brgyud zab gter chos mdzod rin po che Pemé Namröl Düjom Lingpé Kornyé Gyüzap Terchö Dzö Rinpoché The Collected Terma Rediscoveries of Terchen Düjom Lingpa par yig paryik publisher’s proofs pra be se Trabesé 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 Pel Dorjé Purpa Tsawé Gyükyi Dumbü Drelpa Nyingpo Düpa Pelchen Gyepé Zhellung dpal spungs Pelpung Other Dates Type Person Text Term San. Prabhahasti(?) Commentary on “The Fragment of the Vajrakīlaya Root Tantra” Person Text Place Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 40 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 Pelsangwé Nyingpo Dekhonanyi Ngepé Gyükyi Drelpa Chokchü Münpa Tamché Nampar Selwa Commentary on “The Secret Essence Tantra” Text sprul sku Trülku reincarnate lama Term Wylie Phonetics English phur pa purpa phur pa bcu gnyis Purpa Chunyi The Twelve-fold Kīlaya Tantra Text phyogs bcu mun sel Chokchü Münsel See 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 Text ’phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padma phreng gi don bsdus pa Pakpa Tapkyi Zhakpa A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Pema Trenggi Dön Garland Synopsis Düpa Text ’phags pa thabs kyi Pakpa Tapkyi Zhakpa A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus zhags pa padma Pema Trenggi Dön Garland Synopsis ’phreng gi don bsdus Düpa pa Text ’phags pa thabs kyi Pakpa Tapkyi Zhakpa A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus zhags pa padmo Pemo Trenggi Dön Garland Synopsis ’phreng gi don bsdus Düpa pa Text The Commentary on “A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis” Text Pha ’phags pa thabs Pakpa Tapkyi Zhakpa kyi zhags pa padmo Pemo Trenggi Düpé ’phreng gi don bsdus Drelpa pa’i ’grel pa Other Dates San. kīlaya ’phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padmo’i phreng Pakpa Tapkyi Zhakpa See ’Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa Pemö Treng padmo ’phreng gi don bsdus pa ’phang thang ma Pangtangma Type Term Text a list of tantras translated in the earliest period of Buddhism in Tibet Text a list of tantras ’phang Pangtangma: thang ma/ dkar chag Karchak Pangtangma, translated in the ’phang thang ma/ Drajor Bampo Nyipa earliest period of Buddhism in sgra sbyor bam po Tibet gnyis pa Text Ba Wylie Phonetics bu ston Butön bon Bön English Other Dates Type 1290-1364 Person Organization Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 41 byang gter Jangter Northern Treasures Tradition byung jung occurred bye ma la mu tra Jemalamutra San. Vimalamitra Person bla ma lama San. guru Term ’bru ’grel rgan po Drudrel Genpo Textual Collection Term Text Ma Wylie Phonetics English ma dpe Mapé exemplar Other Dates Type Term ma mo mamo wrathful female deity Term ma hā yo ga’i rgyud sde bco brgyad Mahayogé Gyüdé Chobgyé Eighteen Tantras of Mahāyoga Textual Collection man ngag lta ’phreng Menngak Tatreng Instructions on the Garland of Views Text myang ’das Nyangdé See Rdo rje phur bu chos thams cad mya ngan las ’das pa’i rgyud chen po Text smin grol gling Mindrölling Place Tsha Wylie Phonetics tshal pa Tselpa English Other Dates Type Place mtshams brag Tsamdrak Place Dza Wylie Phonetics English rdzogs chen Dzokchen Great Perfection Other Dates Type Wylie Phonetics English zhe chen Zhechen zhes gsungs te zhé sungté it is said Wylie Phonetics English zangs gling ma Zanglingma Text zil gnon nam mkha’i rdo rje Zilnön Namkhé Dorjé Person Doxographical Category Zha Other Dates Type Place Term Za Other Dates Type Ya Wylie Phonetics English yang yang also Other Dates Type Term yin nam yinnam there is...or alternatively Term Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 42 Ra Wylie Phonetics English rang bzo rangzo individualistic contrivance ratna gling pa Ratna Lingpa ral gcig ma Relchikma rig ’dzin Rikdzin rig ’dzin tshe dbang nor bu Rikdzin Tsewang Norbu rin chen bzang po Rinchen Zangpo rong zom bka’ ’bum Rongzom Kabum rong zom chos kyi bzang po Rongzom Chökyi Zangpo rong zom pa Rongzompa See Rong zom chos kyi bzang po Wylie Phonetics English li thang Litang Other Dates Type Term 1403-1479 Person Single Lock of Hair San. Ekajaṭā Buddhist deity Person 1698-1755 Person 958-1055 Person Rongzom’s Collected Works Textual Collection Person Person La Other Dates Type Place Sa Wylie Phonetics English Other Dates Type sa skya Sakya sras mchog sechok supreme son(s) Term gsar ma pa Sarmapa Followers of the New Translation traditions Organization gser gyi lag bris ma Sergyi Lak Drima Golden Tengyur Textual Collection bsam yas Samyé Organization Place Ha Wylie Phonetics lha lung Lhalung English lha sa Lhasa lhan kar ma Lhenkarma list of tantras translated in the earliest period of Buddhism in Tibet Phonetics English Other Dates Type Place Place Text Sanskrit Wylie Sanskrit Dates Type bodhisattva Term Buddhagupta Person the actual speech of Buddhavacana the enlightened ones Term Ḍākinī Buddhist deity dharma Term Guhyasamāja Text Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) root text 43 guru Term Hūṃkara Person Jaḥ Person kīla Term Mahāyāna Doxographical Category Mahāyoga Doxographical Category Mañjuśrīmitra Person mantra Term mūla Term nidāna Term Padmasambhava Person samaya Term Sambhava Person Śāntigarbha Person Śrī heruka Buddhist deity tantra Term Vairocana Buddhist deity Vajrakīlaya Buddhist deity Vajrapaṇi Buddhist deity Vajrasattva Buddhist deity Vajrayāna Doxographical Category Vidyādhara Name Yogatantra Doxographical Category Chinese Wylie Phonetics English Chinese Dunhuang Dates Type Place Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 44 Bibliography 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. (Microiche available from The Institute for Advanced Studies of World Religions, LMpj 014,862 - 014, 907. An electronic version is now available from 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. (Microiche 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 classiication, “RNYING MA’I RGYUD ’BUM MSS,” with the pressmark, OR15217. Volume ka is held at the Bodleian Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 45 Library Oxford at the shelfmark, MS. Tib.a.24(R). (Microilm 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 Collection of the Rnying ma pa from the Nubri area, held by The National Archives, Kathmandu. (Microilm 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. Microiche 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 microilm 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 Cantwell & Mayer: A Noble Noose of Methods, the Lotus Garland Synopsis 46 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. Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5 (December 2009) 47 ’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. 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