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Defining Mahāyoga
Some years ago I was chatting to someone at a conference about the work I had been doing on Mahāyoga texts in the Dunhuang collections. “But what,” he asked, “is Mahāyoga anyway?” Though the later...
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Monks and Mahāyoga
As you probably know, after the collapse of Tibetan imperial power towards the end of the 9th century, the lineage of monastic vows (the vinaya) died out in Central Tibet. During the ensuing dark...
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Manuscripts under the microscope
What I like about working with manuscripts is that there are so many different ways to approach them. You can read the texts written on them (and sometimes that’s as far as you get) but you can also...
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An exile far from home
Detail from IOL Tib J 1410 There is a sutra from the Dunhuang cave that is one of the few truly “illuminated” manuscripts from this collection; that is to say, it has small pictures of buddhas...
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The Original Bodhicaryāvatāra
The Bodhicaryāvatāra or “Way of the Bodhisattva” as it is often translated, is one of the most read texts in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.* This is hardly surprising, as it’s author Śāntideva...
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Silk Road phrasebooks
Phrasebooks still seem to sell quite well, judging by their presence on bookshop shelves. If translation apps do eventually make them redundant, it will be the end of a tradition that goes back a long...
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Ancient Tibetan Seals
Recently I spent some time at the British Museum looking at objects from the Tibetan forts of Miran and Mazar Tagh, where many of the Tibetan manuscripts that I work with at the British Library come...
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The First Tibetan Buddhist Biographies?
The vast amount of biographical and autobiographical literature produced in Tibet over the centuries is an interesting phenomenon. For a culture so pervaded by the Buddha’s teaching of non-self, there...
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The Earliest Evidence of Bonpo Rituals?
A record of a ritual to a local deity, found in Miran (IOL Tib J 255) The four-sided, pointed stick pictured above was found in the desert fortress of Miran by Aurel Stein in 1907. Along with the most...
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Blood writing
There is something compelling about the idea of a text written in blood. The 20th century Chinese writer Lu Xun once said “Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood.” Here the...
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