Kanjur Collections in Tibet´s Borderlands

The Tibetan Buddhist Canon as it is known today, consisting of the two distinct sections, Kanjur ("[Buddha`s] word in translation") and Tanjur ("exegetical treatises in translation"), developed over a period of more than five centuries. In the 9th century Buddhist sacred texts of mainly Indian origin started to be systematically translated into Tibetan, and by the early 14th century the literary corpora "Kanjur" and "Tanjur" emerged in their present form. The significance of these collections exceeds by far that of mere literary oeuvres in the sense of texts to be read and studied. In particular Kanjurs are also objects of ritual veneration. Representing the Buddha in his aspect of speech, a Kanjur should be present in every temple. Accordingly, Kanjurs were produced in considerable number in the course of the centuries, commissioned by religious and political leaders as well as wealthy Buddhist lay- people. Many of them were destroyed by the ravage of time and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Still, some 40 distinct editions are known today. The majority of them belong to a mainstream tradition, transmitted in two distinct lines, based on manuscript Kanjurs compiled in Central Tibet in 14th and 15th century (Tshal pa and Them spangs ma). All the other Kanjurs that do not fit into either of these groups are generally subsumed as "local" or "independent" Kanjurs. For research, they become increasingly significant as representatives of alternative textual traditions, preserving different, occasionally older recensions and translations of texts, and also texts that are not contained in the mainstream Kanjurs, and, thus, opening the view on a richer religious and literary heritage. Several local Kanjurs were discovered in recent years in Ladakh (17th cent.), Nepal (Dolpo and Mustang, 14th cent.), and Bhutan (14th 20th cent.), and preliminary studies reveal that some of these collections did not remain strictly "local", but had a greater impact on the canonical transmission than generally expected. The present project aims at identifying currently unknown lines of textual transmission between Mustang and Dol po (Nepal) and Ladakh, possible Central Tibetan sources of this material, and its position within the development of Tibetan canonical literature in general, including entangled traditions emerging in the course of its transmission. For this purpose, the documentation of collections already known and still to be discovered has to be completed, the material has to be catalogued, archived, and made digitally accessible to international research. Comparative structural and text-critical analysis of all the Kanjurs as well as of older manuscript collections (11th -14th cent.)recently discovered in the western Himalaya are expected to reveal lines of transmission and shed new light on the development of the Tibetan Buddhist Canon.

While previous research on the Tibetan Buddhist canon focused mostly on the more commonly known mainstream traditions, the importance of local canonical collections outside of these has been noted only recently. In order to address this lacuna, the project set out to document and digitise several of such local collections of Tibetan Buddhist canonical manuscripts, hitherto unstudied or even unknown to western academia, in different locations along the Himalayan range, and to investigate them in relation to other collections already digitised. A particular focus of the current project phase were the Nepalese borderlands areas of Upper Dolpo and Upper Mustang, where altogether three larger collections of Tibetan canonical manuscripts (Namgyal, Nesar, Lang) were documented. A cooperation with the Loden Foundation further allowed for the digitization of a canonical collection in Eastern Bhutan. The wealth of this material is made available through the online archive Resources for Kanjur & Tanjur Studies (rKTs), which ensures the long-term preservation of the manuscript collections in a digital format. Research on these newly available collections confirmed an earlier hypothesis, that is, the assumption of a larger network of related collections between Ladakh, Mustang, and Dolpo (a so-called "Mustang group") that developed beyond the previously known mainstream traditions. The identification of this network and some of its central features, is to be seen as a major contribution to understanding the larger development of the Tibetan canon. In the analysis of the documented collections it was possible to delineate crucial structural patterns. A core element of these manuscript holdings are so-called "Stra collections," which, as a first analysis has shown, represent a canonical model that developed before and besides later mainstream Kanjurs that emerged in the fourteenth century. The importance of this material for understanding the formation of the Tibetan canon is obvious, and hence will be addressed in more detail and in a comparative perspective in a follow-up project. While one monograph was dedicated to a particular stunning example of such a Stra collection from Mustang, two further monographs examined material documented in previous projects in Ladakh. One of these investigates an early Tibetan stra anthology; the second one the manuscript Kanjur from Shey Palace. Beyond the aforementioned three monographs, research results from the project were disseminated in numerous talks at different venues and through several articles. All published outcome is made available in an Open Access format.