Contributions to the Cultural History of Early Tibet BTSL-14-kapstein_CS2.indd i 11-6-2007 14:25:01 Brill’s Tibetan Studies Library Edited by Henk Blezer Alex McKay Charles Ramble VOLUME 14 BTSL-14-kapstein_CS2.indd ii 11-6-2007 14:25:01 Contributions to the Cultural History of Early Tibet Edited by Matthew T. Kapstein Brandon Dotson LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007 BTSL-14-kapstein_CS2.indd iii 11-6-2007 14:25:01 Cover illustration: Miniature of the bodhisattva Nyi ma rab tu snang ba adorning a 12th century Prajñ§p§ramit§ manuscript preserved at the 8th century temple of ’On Ke-ru. Photo courtesy of the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library (www.thdl.org). This book is printed on acid-free paper. ISSN: 1568-6183 ISBN: 978 90 04 16064 4 Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. 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Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands BTSL-14-kapstein_CS2.indd iv 11-6-2007 14:25:01 CONTENTS Preface ............................................................................................. vii Abbreviations ................................................................................. xiii PART ONE: SOCIAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY BRANDON DOTSON Divination and Law in the Tibetan Empire: The Role of Dice in the Legislation of Loans, Interest, Marital Law and Troop Conscription ............................................... 3 BIANCA HORLEMANN The Relations of the Eleventh-Century Tsong kha Tribal Confederation to Its Neighbour States on the Silk Road ................. 79 PART TWO: LITERARY AND ORAL TRANSMISSIONS YOSHIRO IMAEDA The History of the Cycle of Birth and Death: A Tibetan Narrative from Dunhuang ............................................ 105 SAM VAN SCHAIK Oral Teachings and Written Texts: Transmission and Transformation in Dunhuang ........................................................ 183 PART THREE: CHINESE TRENDS IN TIBETAN BUDDHISM MATTHEW T. KAPSTEIN The Tibetan Yulanpen jing ̍ϥŢǮʷǶ ................................... 211 vi CONTENTS CARMEN MEINERT The Conjunction of Chinese Chan and Tibetan Rdzogs chen Thought: Reflections on the Tibetan Dunhuang Manuscripts IOL Tib J 689-1 and PT 699 ......................................................... 239 List of Contributors ....................................................................... 303 Illustrations .................................................................................... 305 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 public- ation. 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 Touen- houang 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 other- wise. The contributions to the present volume exemplify the concern for minute detail that is essential for progress in this area, but at the 1 T. TAKEUCHI 1995. Tibetan Contracts from Central Asia. Tokyo: Daizo Shuppan. viii M.T. KAPSTEIN AND B. DOTSON 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 post- imperial 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 indep- endent 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- 2 For instance, M.T. KAPSTEIN 2000. The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism: Conversion, Contestation, and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, esp. 10-17, 54-56. PREFACE ix stood. The two chapters of part two, ‘Literary and Oral Trans- missions’, 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 bon- po 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 concern- ing, 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