Historical and religious inscriptions in mNga´ris (West Tibet, PR China)

The proposed project "Historical and Religious Inscriptions in mNga` ris (West Tibet, PR China)" will build directly on the FWF project "Tibetan Inscriptions", which is presently being conducted as part of the National Research Network "The Cultural History of the Western Himalaya from the 8th Century" (scheduled end of the project: December 2012). From 2007 to 2009 the applicant was employed as the main researcher in this project and since the beginning of 2010 he has acted as its director. In the framework of this and a previous project (2001- 2006), eleven field trips to North India, Northwest Nepal and West Tibet (Ru thog, sGar, rTsa mda`, sPu rang, dGe rgyas, sGe rtse, mTsho chen) could be carried out, resulting in the documentation of numerous inscriptions, of which some selected examples have already been published. The two field trips to West Tibet that were conducted in co-operation with the Tibetan Academy of Social Sciences in Lhasa from 9 January to 4 March 2009 and from 1 September to 17 October 2010 deserve special mention. During these two field trips, the applicant visited a number of areas that had previously been completely inaccessible to Western scholars and he was able to prepare the first complete and detailed documentation of a considerable number of inscriptions. `Khor chags, sKyid thang (both in sPu rang), mTho lding, rTsa rang / rTsa pa rang, and Dung dkar (all in rTsa mda`) turned out to be particularly important and high-yielding places. Within the framework of the proposed project, historical and religious inscriptions found in various temples at these sites will be made available for the first time by means of diplomatic editions with critical apparatus and annotated translations. It is to be expected that this will not only contribute to our still rudimentary knowledge of the history of West Tibet from the 10th/11th century, but the work on the religious inscriptions will, in particular, also provide a basis for future art-historical studies on the murals with which most of these inscriptions are combined. In addition to the philological work, two field trips shall be undertaken to areas that have not yet been visited in order to search for further inscriptions and to thus complete the documentation of the epigraphic sources in mNga` ris that survived the ravages of the Cultural Revolution.

In this project, selected inscriptions and cycles of inscriptions found in various temples in mNga ris (West Tibet) were made available by means of diplomatic editions with critical apparatus and annotated English translations. The first complete and detailed documentation of these sources could be prepared during two field trips (2009 and 2010) that were carried out within the framework of a previous project in cooperation with the Tibetan Academy of Social Sciences (Lhasa). Specifically, four historical inscriptions, some of them very extensive, in the monasteries of dGung phur (1), Khor chags (2) and mTho lding (1) were studied as well as two inscriptional cycles on the life of the historical Buddha found in cave temple no. 1 in Dung dkar and in the monastery of mTho lding. The historical inscriptions provide numerous individual pieces of information on important events and personalities in the history of West Tibet up to the beginning of the 17th century. In particular, they constitute valuable witnesses for the study of the royal genealogies of sPu rang, Gu ge and Ya rtse as well as for an appraisal of the influence that the Bri gung-, the Sa skya-(/Ngor-) and the dGe lugs-school of Tibetan Buddhism had in these three former kingdoms. Finally, the inscriptions also contain much information on the history and artistic design of the respective monasteries in which they are found. The studies of the two epigraphic cycles on the life of the historical Buddha provide a basis for the identification of the partially destroyed murals that the inscriptions are combined with, and thus they contribute to the future art-historical treatment of the painted scenes. In addition, the cycle in Dung dkar, probably dating back to the late eleventh or early twelfth century, is not only of interest as the presumably earliest surviving epigraphic witness on the life of the historical Buddha in the Tibetan cultural realm but it also constitutes a valuable document for future studies on the palaeography and orthography of early Tibetan textual sources.