Codicology, Paelography, and Orthography of Early Tibetan Documents: Methods and a Case Study. (Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde 89.) Wien: Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien, Universität Wien, 2016. (Open-access pdf now available!)
(Open-access pdf now available via the link below!)
This short illustrated book offers a general ... more (Open-access pdf now available via the link below!)
This short illustrated book offers a general introduction to the physical, paleographic, and grammatical features of early Tibetan documents and writings. As a practical introduction, it emphasizes Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts, and lays out specific methods for recording, and in many cases quantifying codicological, paleographic, and orthographic features. The approach unites digital humanities with the examination of original documents to offer scholars a working method for describing early Tibetan writings.
The book has two main sections. The first, longer section introduces methods for describing early Tibetan documents and writings, and the second, shorter section demonstrates these methods through a case study of a selection of documents. The first section consists of four parts. The first part concerns codicology in the narrow sense of the description of the physical features of a document, from its materiality to its mise en page. The second part details methods for recording the orthographic and grammatical features of early Tibetan writing, with an emphasis on quantification. The quantifiable features are often specific to 8th to 10th century written Tibetan, but many features are applicable to later writings, and the methods themselves – in particular the emphasis on quantification – can be adapted to later Tibetan writings. The third part introduces methods for describing the paleography of early Tibetan handwriting. Emphasizing ductus, it puts forward a typology of index letters, and delineates a cluster of features to be recorded in order to characterize a given scribal hand. Part four, “miscellanea,” is a very short catchall for those features that fall outside of the parameters of codicology, orthography, and paleography. Examples would be the inclusion in the text of personal names, loan words, and idiosyncratic orthographies that don’t fall under existing rubrics in part two.
The second section of the book is a case study that demonstrates the methods introduced in the first section. It describes the codicological, orthographic, and paleographic features of a selection of pivotal and fairly well-discussed Old Tibetan documents, including the Old Tibetan Chronicle and two versions of the Old Tibetan Rāmāyaṇa. The documents are presented briefly, and the relevant data is arranged in a table for ease of comparison. In the process, the case study discusses several significant markers for dating documents and writing, from paper re-use to specific orthographic features. An appendix gives a detailed description of the Old Tibetan Chronicle itself as a model for applying our methods for describing manuscripts and writings.
https://www.istb.univie.ac.at/cgi-bin/wstb/wstb.cgi?ID=92&show_description=1
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Books by Brandon Dotson
The result of the authors’ painstaking documentation of over 1,500 Tibetan copies of the Sutra of Limitless Life from Dunhuang, now kept in the British Library’s Stein Collection, this book provides a detailed study of the sutra copies, how they were produced for the Tibetan emperor in ninth-century Dunhuang, and how they were conserved in twentieth-century England. It explores the lives of Dunhuang’s multi-ethnic scribes, editors, and administrators and reveals how their practices changed in a short period of time during the 820s. In addition, the book surveys the significant differences across the multiple Tibetan and Chinese versions of the Sutra of Limitless Life (Tib. Tshe dpag du myed pa’i mdo; Ch. Wuliangshou zongyao jing; Skt. Aparimitāyuḥ sūtra) circulating in Dunhuang at this time, and introduces a previously unknown Tibetan version. Through working with such a large cross section of the Stein Collection, and by coming to terms with one of the single largest groups of Dunhuang manuscripts, the book provides new insights into how these manuscripts were documented and conserved, on their way from Dunhuang through Khotan to London and at the British Museum, India Office Library, and British Library.
This short illustrated book offers a general introduction to the physical, paleographic, and grammatical features of early Tibetan documents and writings. As a practical introduction, it emphasizes Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts, and lays out specific methods for recording, and in many cases quantifying codicological, paleographic, and orthographic features. The approach unites digital humanities with the examination of original documents to offer scholars a working method for describing early Tibetan writings.
The book has two main sections. The first, longer section introduces methods for describing early Tibetan documents and writings, and the second, shorter section demonstrates these methods through a case study of a selection of documents. The first section consists of four parts. The first part concerns codicology in the narrow sense of the description of the physical features of a document, from its materiality to its mise en page. The second part details methods for recording the orthographic and grammatical features of early Tibetan writing, with an emphasis on quantification. The quantifiable features are often specific to 8th to 10th century written Tibetan, but many features are applicable to later writings, and the methods themselves – in particular the emphasis on quantification – can be adapted to later Tibetan writings. The third part introduces methods for describing the paleography of early Tibetan handwriting. Emphasizing ductus, it puts forward a typology of index letters, and delineates a cluster of features to be recorded in order to characterize a given scribal hand. Part four, “miscellanea,” is a very short catchall for those features that fall outside of the parameters of codicology, orthography, and paleography. Examples would be the inclusion in the text of personal names, loan words, and idiosyncratic orthographies that don’t fall under existing rubrics in part two.
The second section of the book is a case study that demonstrates the methods introduced in the first section. It describes the codicological, orthographic, and paleographic features of a selection of pivotal and fairly well-discussed Old Tibetan documents, including the Old Tibetan Chronicle and two versions of the Old Tibetan Rāmāyaṇa. The documents are presented briefly, and the relevant data is arranged in a table for ease of comparison. In the process, the case study discusses several significant markers for dating documents and writing, from paper re-use to specific orthographic features. An appendix gives a detailed description of the Old Tibetan Chronicle itself as a model for applying our methods for describing manuscripts and writings.
https://www.istb.univie.ac.at/cgi-bin/wstb/wstb.cgi?ID=92&show_description=1
Papers by Brandon Dotson
“The Tale of the Separation of Horse and Kiang,” a 9th- or 10th-century Tibetan ritual text recovered from Dunhuang, is a work of both simplicity and of extraordinary richness. This article offers a guided reading through this performative text, and describes its use of various poetic devices common to the genre of ritual antecedent tales. It also teases out some intriguing structural parallels and reversals in the plot of the narrative, and in the relationship it imagines between horses and humans. An application of Peter Rabinowitz's typology of four audiences reveals how the tale operates on different levels, simultaneously appealing to an ideal narrative audience of equine listeners, an ideal human audience that takes the world of this tale as real, a literary/performative audience that is familiar with the genre of ritual antecedent tales, and an actual audience of readers and listeners ranging from those who are ignorant of these tales and their genre to those who know them well. Considering also the plot's arc and the role of affect in the bodies of the tale's listeners, the article offers suggestions for how such tales impacted their various audiences.
From the first studies of early Tibetan divination texts inaugurated by A.H. Francke, scholars have emphasized the comparative and cross-cultural analysis of this method of divination. Such comparisons initially drew on the Runic Turkic Irk Bitiq, the Sanskrit Pāśakakevalī and the Bower Manuscript, and in more recent times have explored possible connections with Islamic traditions preserved in books known in Arabic as Kitāb al-Fāl and in Persian as Fāl-namāh and with Chinese traditions preserved among the Dunhuang manuscripts.
The present contribution approaches this method of dice divination not through the mutable elements of poetics, and ideas of fate, luck, and fortune, which are open to adaptation to the social, aesthetic, and religious norms of various divining communities. Rather, it approaches this method of divination through a series of numbers that constitute its “bones,” or defining elements. These include the four faces of a die; the symbols on each face; the number of omens one should receive (often three); the number of divination omens in a divination book (sixty-four); and the numerical probability of receiving a good, bad, or mixed divination. In the process of examining these numbers and comparing them across traditions, the analysis clarifies the relationship between certain traditions and offers some tentative remarks about transmission.