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Contributions to the Cultural History of Early Tibet (Brill's Tibetan Studies Library) By Kapstein, M.T. (ed.), Dotson, B. (ed.)

Early medieval Tibet remains one of the most challenging fields in Tibetan Studies overall, wherein numerous mysteries remain. The six contributions comprising the present collection shed light on major topics in history, literature and religion.



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PREFACE

Six decades ago, when Documents de Touen-houang relatifs à

l’histoire du Tibet was released, Jacques Bacot remarked in his

foreword that in 1922, when he had first attempted to translate the

texts now known as the Old Tibetan Chronicle and the Old Tibetan

Annals, he judged his efforts to be too insufficient to merit publication.

The study of an important Tibetan lexicon of archaic terms, the

Li shi gur khang, together with the progress realized by F.W.

Thomas in the investigation of the Dunhuang manuscripts in

London, as well as Ch. Toussaint’s recognition of archaisms in the

Padma bka’ thang, permitted the three scholars to launch a fruitful

collaboration, resulting in the first sustained interpretation of a key

collection of Old Tibetan historical texts. Though many aspects of

their work have been by now superceded, Documents de Touenhouang

remains a landmark in the study of early medieval Tibet.

The considerable progress realized since that time has been due to

the patient labours of Tibetanists in Europe and Japan, and

increasingly in the Tibet Autonomous Region, China and the United

States as well. With the application of new digital technologies to the

reproduction and analysis of early Tibetan documents, what began as

a slow trickle of research has grown into a stream, and matters that

were formerly obscure to the point of unintelligibility have gradually

come to be elucidated.

With this development of the field, scholars are increasingly

attending to the social and cultural milieux of the early period. This

can be seen in the painstaking work of Tsuguhito Takeuchi in his

investigations of letters, contracts and related documents dating to

the imperial period.1 Attention to detail in the investigation of such

quotidian matters adds depth and dimension to our understanding of

a period that has all too often served as a pristine ground onto which

scholars, both inside the Tibetan cultural area and beyond, have

projected their idealizations of a heroic past, be it Buddhist or otherwise.

The contributions to the present volume exemplify the concern

for minute detail that is essential for progress in this area, but at the

same time engage many of the larger questions facing historians of

early Tibet.

In part one, ‘Social and Political History’, the contributors

examine key aspects of Tibetan imperial administration and postimperial

affairs. The first chapter, by Brandon Dotson, applies a

social-historical approach to Old Tibetan legal documents, encoded

within which the values and practices of the Tibetan Empire, and its

rigid social stratification, are revealed. They also shed much light on

such topics as Tibetan marriage and exchange patterns, loan

contracts, corvée labour, the legal status of Buddhist temples and

monasteries, and the conscription system of the Tibetan military.

Strong centralization appears to have been the rule under the empire

of the btsan po, and the diffuse ‘galactic polity’ that came to

characterize later Tibetan regimes is hardly at all in evidence. One of

the most intriguing aspects of Dotson’s chapter is the revelation that

legal cases were often resolved with recourse to divination dice.

Divination was a popular and widespread practice during the

imperial period, and is discussed in Old Tibetan ritual texts in which

ritual specialists known as bon and gshen employ mo divination in

their healing rites.

With the empire’s disintegration in the mid-ninth century, power

devolved upon local authorities and strongmen, who took charge not

just of the governance of their domains, but equally of their external

relationships. Tibet, in effect, became for a time a cluster of independent

principalities. Bianca Horlemann’s chapter focuses upon the

Inner Asian connections of one such realm, that of Tsong-kha in the

northeastern region of Amdo. Though far removed from Tibet’s

traditional central districts of Dbus-Gtsang, the effort to recapitulate

aspects of Tibet’s earlier imperial configuration is evident in the later

claim that Tsong-kha’s rulers were descended from the Yar-lung

kings and the attribution to them, accordingly, of the title of btsan

po.

As prior studies have shown, the rise of the Tibetan Empire

occasioned not only changes of power relations, but equally changes

of knowledge, requiring new technologies associated with the spread

of literacy:2 the redaction of legal procedure considered by Dotson

offers a case in point. The ways and means of the transmission of

knowledge during this period, however, are still but poorly under-

stood. The two chapters of part two, ‘Literary and Oral Transmissions’,

take up several dimensions of the question.

Yoshiro Imaeda’s reconstruction and translation of the Dunhuang

Tibetan text, History of the Cycle of Birth and Death, is already well

known through its original French publication in 1981. In presenting

it here in a revised English version, it is to be hoped that it will reach

a larger readership than it had previously. As with Dotson’s

discussion of the close relationship between administrative and ritual

functions, early Tibetan ritual is also central to Imaeda’s chapter in

its consideration of funerary practices. The study of Old Tibetan

mortuary rites, an especially interesting subfield within the overall

cultural history of early Tibet, was essentially pioneered by M.

Lalou, whose treatment of PT 1042, concerning royal funerals, paved

the way for the documentary investigation of such issues as the

rivallry of bon-po and Buddhist, and the competition of ritual

specialists for royal patronage.3 Nevertheless, research in this area

has often rested on the problematic assumption that the bon and bonpo

found in Old Tibetan literary texts were more or less identical to

the adherents of the Bon religion, as systematized in about the early

eleventh century.4

Among the Dunhuang manuscripts, we find several texts concerning,

or related to, funeral rites. Most of these contain narratives in

which the dead are attended by ritual specialists known as bon or

gshen, and often involve the sacrifice of sheep and horses as

psychopomp animals that guide the deceased to the land of the dead.5

While some of these texts display no apparent Buddhist influence,

others do, and one Buddhist text famously co-opts and transforms

early Tibetan funerary rites in order to do away with such practices

as animal sacrifice. 6 This dialogue between Buddhism and local

traditions is a common theme throughout Buddhist history, and is

particularly pertinent to its Tibetan permutations, where issues of

religious identity are so often bound up with dialogic evolution and

mimicry.7 Situated within the context of these competing funerary

rites, Imaeda’s text, the History of the Cycle of Birth and Death is, he

argues, a purely Tibetan composition inspired by one of the masterpieces

of Mahyna literature, the Gaavyhastra, a work that

enjoyed tremendous success in medieval China. As such, the History

is based not on the transformation and co-opting of existing non-

Buddhist rites, but takes Buddhist canonical tradition as its point of

departure, and then popularizes this for a Tibetan audience. The

transposition of its story into a Tibetan verse-narrative offers

particularly striking evidence of the processes whereby Buddhist

ideas and literary motifs were assimilated into the Tibetan cultural

milieu.

Imaeda’s work is based upon a number of Dunhuang manuscripts,

all of which are incomplete. And where they overlap with one

another, although the texts generally correspond quite closely, one

notices numbers of variants that cannot be readily explained with

reference to scribal practice alone. How are we to think about the

variation that we find in the extant Old Tibetan documents? It is this

question that is taken up in Sam van Schaik’s chapter, applying the

conclusions of investigations of medieval oral and literary transmission

to the study of early Tibetan texts. Van Schaik argues that

the simple dichotomy of the oral versus the literary fails to do justice

to the complexity of the Tibetan situation, where, just as in medieval

Europe, oral practice and writing in various ways were mutually

informed and conditioned. In the scenario that van Schaik envisions

as having given rise to some of these texts—students taking down

the words of their teachers either in person or from memory—the

patterns of variation in early Tibetan texts are seen to resemble

somewhat those that we find in English traditional ballads. And considering

the structured repetitions characterizing a work such as the

History of the Cycle of Birth and Death, studied by Imaeda, the

comparison with Western ballad traditions seems a compelling one.

Though the transmission of Indian Buddhist traditions to Tibet,

both under the empire and for many centuries after, has long been a

key theme in the representation of Tibetan cultural history, we know

that Chinese learning, religious and secular, reached imperial Tibet

as well. Part three, ‘Chinese Trends in Tibetan Buddhism’, explores

this east-to-west movement of texts and ideas.

Matthew T. Kapstein’s chapter, ‘The Tibetan Yulanpen jing’,

supplies a textual study of the ninth-century Tibetan translation of a

famous Chinese Buddhist apocryphon, thus extending a line of

research pioneered by the late R.A. Stein. As a close comparison of

the Chinese and Tibetan texts reveals, the translator, the famed ’Gos

Chos-grub of Dunhuang, gave to this short stra, which concerns

rites to be performed for the salvation of deceased parents and

ancestors, an almost impeccable Indian veneer. Nevertheless, the

work’s Chinese antecedents remain evident in several key turns of

phrase. The transmission of the Yulanpen jing to Tibet, moreover,

suggests that Chinese ‘popular’ Buddhism, and not only the more

rarified traditions of learning and meditation, may have played some

role in the Tibetan adoption of the foreign religion.

As with the History of the Cycle of Birth and Death, in connection

with which the question of ‘apocryphal’ Buddhist scriptures is also

raised, the action in the Yulanpen jing is driven by the death of one’s

parents. The orientation of the two works is similar as well: as

Imaeda notes in his conclusions, the History of the Cycle of Birth and

Death, in common with the other early Tibetan funerary texts,

appears to have been concerned more with transcendent rebirth than

with enlightenment and ‘precious human birth’. The same can be

said of the Yulanpen jing, in which the Buddha prescribes the proper

rites for securing the rebirth of Mulian’s parents and ancestors in

heavenly abodes.

In Carmen Meinert’s contribution, however, we turn to the refined

meditations of Chinese Chan, and their plausible connections with

the Tibetan Great Perfection, or Rdzogs-chen. Although this issue

has aroused considerable speculation in recent decades, only slight

progress has been made in grounding the discussion in solid

philological evidence. It is this that Meinert begins to accomplish,

through the careful comparison of selected Chan and Rdzogs-chen

documents from Dunhuang, demonstrating precisely their complex

relationships. Meinert’s analysis, like that proposed recently by S.

van Schaik and J. Dalton, describes the creative evolution of

religious practices between China and Tibet in multi-ethnic

Dunhuang.8 Here, trends such as Chan, Mahyoga and Rdzogs-chen

enjoyed a degree of fluidity prior to their codification as distinct

systems of teaching. Meinert’s doctrinal analysis is complemented

by van Schaik’s observations on oral tradition, which allow us to

imagine a time of creative exuberance when, as in van Schaik’s

phrasebook, one adept might meet another and exclaim, ‘I like

Vajrayna. Teach it!’

For facilitating the present publication, we are grateful for the

encouragements of Albert Hoffstädt at Brill, and those of Henk

Blezer, Alex McKay, and Charles Ramble, the editors of Brill’s

Tibetan Studies Library.

Matthew T. Kapstein

Brandon Dotson

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