The Lives of Bu ston Rin chen grub and the Date and Sources of His Chos 'byung, a Chronicle of Buddhism in India and Tibet * Leonard W.J. van der Kuijp Center for Tibetan Studies, Sichuan University Harvard University For David Seyfort Ruegg, who did so much to introduce us to the polymath Bu ston, his life and some of his works, and for the intrepid individuals of the Dpal brtsegs bod yig dpe rnying zhib 'jug khang, who continue to provide us with so many rare books that illuminate the depth and breadth of Tibet's rich literary culture. Preliminaries: The Multiple Lives of Bu ston o date, the principal source for the life of the great Bu ston Rin chen grub (1290-1364) was his biography by his disciple T Sgra tshad pa Rin chen rgyal mtshan (1318-88), which was studied by D. Seyfort Ruegg now almost fifty years ago in the form of annotated translations and paraphrases of lengthy passages from this work; H. van den Bogaert's recent, more popular rendition is, it needs to be said, somewhat less useful for scholarly purposes and it is evident that he has not always correctly understood his text.1 Sgra tshad pa's work actually consisted of two distinct parts. Sgra tshad pa wrote the first part in Sa skya monastery, in 1355, at the request of Chos kyi rgyal mtshan (1332-59), a scion of Sa skya monastery's Lha * For the prequel to this paper, see my "Some Remarks on the Textual Transmis- sion and Text of Bu ston Rin chen grub's Chos 'byung, a Chronicle of Buddhism in India and Tibet," Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines no. 25 (Avril, 2013), 115-93. Sources that are cited more than thrice are given abbreviations and these can be found in the bibliography of the present paper. 1 See, respectively, Seyfort Ruegg (1966) and a Handful of Flowers. A brief biography of Buton Rinchen Drub, tr. H. van den Bogaert (Dharamsala: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1996). Leonard W.J. van der Kuijp, “The Lives of Bu ston Rin chen grub and the Date and Sources of His Chos ‘byung, a Chronicle of Buddhism in India and Tibet”, Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, no. 35, April 2016, pp. 203-308. 204 Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines khang Residence and he composed the second part in 1366 in Bu ston's personal see of Ri phug Bde chen chos kyi pho brang that is located not far from Zhwa lu monastery where his master stayed for much of his life. Compared to other fourteenth century specimen of the genre, it is in several ways an unbalanced and rather disappoint- ing work. Sgra tshad pa is by and large content with religious hy- perbole of the kind that includes lengthy enumerations and interpre- tive descriptions of Bu ston's visions, all of which are detailed at the expense of surveys of other types of important historical events and the roles Bu ston played in these. This is not to say that these visions are mute and that they reveal nothing that would otherwise inform the historian of those ideas that were current during his lifetime and in which Bu ston played no insignificant roles. Of course they do, and they often contain details that are actually of crucial relevance to the subject, at times even to the extent that their misunderstanding could lead us far away from a more intimate familiarity with, if not Bu ston, then the milieu in which he breathed, lived and worked. But very little of the sort can be deduced from this biography. What Sgra tshad pa does offer his audience, therefore, are by and large mini- malistic descriptions of Bu ston's relationships with his peers and his political activities. Some time ago, J. Gyatso drew attention to the circumstance that many Tibetan religious figures kept diaries that in turn formed critical sources for the composition of autobiographies and biographies.2 We do not know when this habit began or when it became more or less widespread. Sgra tshad pa's fairly thin presen- tation leads us to conclude that either Bu ston himself never kept a diary of the day to day events of his life, or that it had for some rea- son not been accessible to Sgra tshad pa, or that the latter had con- sciously refrained from using it. The first seems to be the more likely scenario. It is equally puzzling that Sgra tshad pa often even seems to have been unclear about the precise dates for some of his master's main compositions, which is surprising as most of their colophons 3 provide these in an unambiguous fashion. Given that he himself 2 See her "Counting Crow's Teeth: Tibetans and Their Diaries," Les habitants du Toit du monde, eds. S. Karmay and Ph. Sagant (Paris: Société d'Ethnologie, 1997), 159-178. 3 Sgra tshad pa also lists, respectively, one letter (spring yig) and two replies to quenries (dris lan) with some of their addressees, namely King Bsod nams lde, on whom see below, G.yag sde Paṇ chen Bsod nams dpal (1299-1378) and Rin chen ye shes. The first was written on July 3, 1339; the second probably refers to the letter in BU26, 245-6 and is undated, and the identification of the third is more problematic, the only available option is a series of replies that is found in BU26, 185-216. Dated to the first half of 1326, this important piece is cursorily discussed in section four of the present essay. Thereafter, Sgra tshad pa notes the compila- tion of the Zhwa lu Gser khang Tanjur and Bu ston's catalog, the latter of which, The Lives of Bu ston Rin chen grub 205 composed two catalogs of Bu ston's oeuvre and that his master had handpicked him to succeed him as abbot of Zhwa lu monastery, we cannot conclude that he had been unable to gain access to these. In short, then, his work is undoubtedly one of the less satisfactory rep- resentatives of its genre, but it is [almost] the only source of infor- mation, and certainly the longest one, that we have for Bu ston's works and days per se. As I show below, Sgra tshad pa was not the only disciple of Bu ston to have written his master's biography. It is therefore a great pity that none of these other disciples considered it worth their while to do the required homework and sit down to write a biography worthy of their master! It is of course possible that their incapacity to do so may have been the result of the sheer weight that their master's voracious and curious intellect was able to exert on their creative impulses even long after his passing. At the very outset of his narrative, Sgra tshad pa describes at some length his master's previous births that we could say culmi- nated in the Kashmirian Śākyaśrībhadra (1127-1225) — hereafter Śākyaśrī — who, as is well known, arrived in Tibet in 1204 at the in- vitation of Khro phu Lo tsā ba Byams pa'i dpal (1172-1236).4 Of course, Bu ston had very close ties with Khro phu monastery. As a young man, he had studied and taught there on numerous occa- 5 sions and just prior to his retirement from his abbatial duties at according to its colophon, was completed on June 12, 1335! All exact dates of the texts cited and individuals mentioned in this paper are calculated with the help of the Tabellen in D. Schuh, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der tibetischen Kalender- rechnung, Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, Supplement Band 16 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1973). 4 For several biographies of Śākyaśrī and Khro phu Lo tsā ba, see D.P. Jackson, Two Biographies of Śākyaśrībhadra. The Eulogy of Khro phu Lo tsā ba and Its "Com- mentary" by Bsod nams dpal bzang po, Tibetan and Indo-Tibetan Studies, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1990) and my review article in van der Kuijp (1994). 5 The most detailed, yet in many places still rather thin, study of the Khro phu Bka' brgyud pa sect so far is the one sketched in Rta tshag Tshe dbang rgyal po's 1446/47 survey of the Bka' brgyud pa school as a whole [minus the Shangs pa Bka' brgyud], the Bka' brgyud rin po che'i lo rgyus phyogs gcig tu bsgrigs pa, C[ultural] P[alace] of N[ationalities, Beijing] catalog no. 002448(6), fols. 185b-201b. For the C.P.N. manuscript of this work, usually known as the Lho rong chos 'byung, see my remarks in "Studies in Fourteenth Century Tibetan Cul- tural History III: The Oeuvre of Bla ma dam pa Bsod nams rgyal mtshan (1312-1375), Part One," Berliner Indologische Studien 7 (1993), 112, n. 4, and my "On the Fifteenth Century Lho rong chos 'byung by Rta tshag Tshe dbang rgyal and Its Importance for Tibetan Political and Religious History," Aspects of Tibetan History, eds. R. Vitali and Tashi Tsering, Lungta 14 (2001), 57-76. In the latter, I discuss inter alia its relationship to the recently printed edition, which omits much that is found towards the end of the above manuscript's narrative of the Khro phu tradition, see the Lho rong chos 'byung, ed. Gling dpon Padma skal bzang and Ma grong Mi 'gyur rdo rje (Lhasa: Bod ljongs bod yig dpe rnying dpe 206 Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines Zhwa lu in 1355, he also functioned briefly as abbot of this smaller institution from circa 1353 to 1354, although his biographies do not specify the reasons for this.