Recovered Connections: The Interdependent Emergence of Tibetan Religious Schools Using Four Recently Uncovered Pre-Mongol-Era Manuscript Caches as Evidence – Lecture by Dan Martin at Sapienza University, Rome.
Within the framework of the Sapienza University SEED PNR 2022 Project titled Tibetan Bonpo Textual Treasures Preserved at the Central National Library of Rome: A (Re-) Discovery (TiBTreaD), Prof. Dan Martin will give a Lecture on Recovered Connections: The Interdependent Emergence of Tibetan Religious Schools Using Four Recently Uncovered Pre-Mongol-Era Manuscript Caches as Evidence.
In the first two decades of our 21st century four Tibetan-language manuscript caches, largely in the form of fragments, have been uncovered in various parts of the main Himalayan range. One site is a little north of eastern Bhutan. Another is nearly a thousand miles away to the west, in Ladakh. What at least two and very likely three of the four caches have in common is a closing date of circa 1200 CE. This means together they represent a body of literature as actually available in that same area prior to the Mongol advent, supplying chronological benchmarks for codicology, paleography and orthography, among still other relevant matters outside our main focus. In this presentation I propose to examine the content of three of the four caches and use their evidence to ask fresh questions about the historical emergence of the various schools of Tibetan religion: Bon religion, the Nyingma school, the Dzogchen and terma traditions the Bon and Nyingma may have shared, the Zhijé, Kagyu, Sakya and Kadam schools, without neglecting lay religious movements that may have never established independent institutions. I would emphasize that this work in progress will only benefit from discussions.
Thursday February 1st 2024
16.00 – 18.00
