 It's my pleasure, great pleasure, to introduce the first Buddhist forum lecture of this entire year. It will be turn one, I will talk about it. I saw that I can do one, so I didn't work out that one. And so it's only the first lecture now in turn two, organized of course by the Center for Buddhist Studies. And sponsors to enable us also to have a seminar by the Cancer Foundation now. And we will have a program of four lectures this year. Two in turn two and one in, or two in turn three in May. And I was very glad that Markus Wiebeck agreed to come to present on his kind of more recent research that he is working on since he kind of returned to Vienna a year ago. Yes, since May last year. So he has actually studied in Vienna at the Institute of South Asian Development Buddhist Studies at the University of Vienna. He has then moved to Heidelberg to work for the, as they call cluster Asia Europe as a kind of assistant professor to the chair of Buddhist studies. And his kind of research goes in different areas, of course, Buddhist philosophy, Tibetan intellectual history, much more about more recent Tibetan past, especially on the second things I don't know much about. But we essentially met again when he decided to return to Vienna to kind of continue the research of the country at larger studies project in Vienna. And actually he joined last year at a research trip that I organized as part of the Tibetan Buddhist Monastery collections today. Documentation to continue the work on the Namgil Country that will found like two years before, started documenting another year before that. And it's in this kind of general area that he will also present some of his first findings, I guess, today on that particular subject. And it may be interesting for you to know Namgil's country, it's actually not a foreign country, it's just two sections, the Prasna Baranita and the Intersection, and we'll also plan a publication together on that because he already finished the catalogue of it, more or less did studies on its relationship to other kind of literature in the Tibetan world and I'll study the illuminations of that country because it's the earliest country or earliest sections of country that has an entire kind of iconographic program planned for it. And so it's the earliest example for that. And so they're pleased to have a year to discuss our project over the next days. And so without further delay he will talk about of the mainstream tracing network of sutra collections across the human liars and that comes directly out of the Namgil Country because one of the two collections is the sutra collection. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, thanks. Many thanks for the introduction. Denonza Bohm, welcome to all of you from my side. I feel quite honored really to be able to speak to you at this special venue. And of course I would like to thank Christian for inviting me in the first place and then also Emma for taking care about all these practical matters of bringing me here. As Christian has said, my talk will bring us to the high Himalayas, to different places, mostly to Mustang Dorpo and also a bit to Ladakh. It will take us to places that are rather secluded, they're rather off the beaten track, so that kind of might be one way to interpret the first half of the title. There's also a more substantial interpretation to it because we will be dealing with textual collections, particularly with sutra collections of a rather special kind. So these are massive textual collections and that sense they're also quite similar in scope to other collections, to canonical collections to conjures. But if we look at them more closely, they're also quite different in nature in comparison to conjures, what we call in conjures studies, the mainstream traditions of canonical literature. In order to make that point clear, I think I will have to start off with some more general background, with some more general explanations on conjures studies. And I think it will also be good to start by explaining some of the background of our current research project at the University of Vienna that Christian had mentioned. So in this project I've been joining Helmut Tauscher and Bruno Le Nehe. They actually have been doing research on conjures studies for the past 20 years in the framework of different research projects. All of them were financed by the Austrian Science Fund. And now we kind of started to establish a very loose umbrella term for this larger, lasting interest, namely the Tibetan manuscript project, Vienna. In the past they've been working mostly in the Western Himalayas, specifically in Ladakh and Sanzka. And now with the current project there's a shift towards the central Himalayas, and I will tell you in a minute why that is the case. In the past Helmut Tauscher and Bruno Le Nehe, they've been locating, digitizing, also cataloging quite a number of conjures and canonical collections in Ladakh and Sanzka, right? And by doing that also contributed to preserving cultural heritage and the literary heritage of Tibetan Buddhism. This is one aspect that's important, preservation, but then also making these important materials accessible, right? For that reason then a database has been created. The resources of conjure and tangular studies has been produced mostly by Bruno Le Nehe. And with the database two things are important. First of all, it should make things openly available, right? And the second issue is the long-term perspective. We would like to make this a long-term affair, and this is an issue that is much more complicated because as you can see so far everything depends on individuals and the different types of research that we do. And the second issue is the long-term perspective. We would like to make this a long-term affair, and this is an issue that is much more complicated because as you can see so far everything depends on individual projects with a very limited duration. And we do all of that in order to foster logical and historical research on Tibetan conjures, not just for ourselves, but really for making this material openly available to a global academic community. When we speak about Tibetan conjures then the plural is really important. As Peter Skilling has noted already in an early article, an article was published more than 20 years ago, historically it's not justified to speak of the Tibetan canon, of the Tibetan conjure. That's not what we have, that's a construct. What we have, what we find on the ground is just a multitude of conjures that were produced at different places. This is for once a political reason. There never was a centralized control over the production of all of these conjures. And there's also a religious significance to it, a religious reason for that. The conjure is important as a religious object, as a symbolic object. It represents for once the speech aspect of the Buddha, but then also the Buddhist teaching the Buddha Dharma in its entirety. And for these reasons Tibetan monasteries ideally they would struggle to get hold of a copy of a conjure to be placed in its main shrine room. Historically we also know not many monasteries were able to do so, but at least kind of this ideal is there. And for this reason really a great number of conjures were produced, much more for example in comparison to tanzhurs, right? That's a common division in Tibetan canonical literature. We have one body of literature, the conjure, the translation of the speeches that are connected to the Buddha, and then the tanzhur, the translation of the treatises composed by Indian authors. To illustrate the multitude of conjures that we have, I would like to use this slide. It's basically a screenshot from an old version of our website of our archive. It's more than a year old, it's not correct anymore, it's changed in the meantime. My ambition was not to be very precise, but rather kind of to show you at one grasp how many conjures we know of. Currently we know of something between 50 to 60 conjures and major canonical collections. It depends of course kind of what we count as a conjure and what then is a canonical collection. When we look at all of these conjures, and ideally in a kind of long term perspective, we would like to include material information, detailed catalogues on all of these conjures into our database. That is very clear, this is very kind of long term goal that we would like to achieve. When we look at these conjures, when we look at their differences, I think it makes sense to speak about their differences in three very rough and fundamental ways in which they are different. First of all, in terms of which works are included or excluded in a specific collection. That's also an issue of size. Historically, conjures tend to grow. First of all what we had in Tibet were smaller Dormang collections. Dormang literally translates as many sutras. So kind of these sutra collections we had later than they developed in something that Helmut Tauscher called proto-conjures. Major, bigger collections. But not fully structured. Fully structured conjures then developed in the 14th century with the model developed by Bhutan Rindjunjop, a famous Tibetan intellectual that kind of developed this first systematic structure of a conjure that then took off and was very much influential over the entire Tibetan cultural sphere. Then the second difference is how these works are ordered, in which sequence are placed in a specific collection or how they form different subgroups in a collection. And then thirdly, and that's a much more fine-grained perspective and it needs a much more fine-grained analysis, the differences on the level of the structure and the text of an individual work. All of these differences between the different conjures and also of course historical material that we find for example in the color phones of these collections or that we find in historiographic materials in Namthas, in biographies and so forth have been used to understand the historical development of conjures in a large scale. And there's a very common distinction that is drawn in conjure studies to distinguish these different conjures. There's a major distinction in the form of two mainstream traditions. So one is the zhalpa tradition, that is actually the tradition that most of the conjures that we commonly use nowadays, these belong to this tradition, like the dergi khanon, the peking khanon, the chon and so forth. All of that belongs to the zhalpa tradition. That goes back to a manuscript conjure that was produced in the 14th century in Tsar-Gung-Tang in central Tibet. Then there's the other mainstream tradition, the tempangma tradition. Also that goes back to a manuscript conjure that was produced also in central Tibet in the 1430s at Janssen. And then there's a third group, yeah, there's a third group, what we call a mixed group. It's basically a conflation between these two mainstream traditions such as the Lhasa and the Natang conjures. And then everything that you see below that is here labeled with these kind of regional tags, yeah, these are conjures that are not well studied yet. And about these we don't know so much. But there's the basic assumption in conjure studies that for any conjure that we find, it's either part or it's directly related to any of the two mainstream traditions, or if that is not the case, then it should be conceived of as something that is called a local tradition, a local conjure. So that's a term that was coined by Helmut Eimer. It should signify local collections that were produced at a specific place from local materials and also had no further reaching impact in literal and textual terms. They were not part of any larger textual networks. And this very basic assumption is the basic assumption that we question in the current phase of our research project. So Helmut Tauschen, Bruno Le Né, a couple of years back, they noted some indications in scattered collections in western Tibet that indicated that there could be a larger textual network that spreads out from the western Himalayas and perhaps to the central Himalayas. And that's basically what we do in the current project phase. We are trying to trace this network and kind of the first findings of this project will be what I will be presenting today. Right. In order to do so, we need to locate and digitize and work on new collections. So we continue a bit with the work in Ladakh. We also work a bit in Bhutan. Here we are in a quite lucky position. We don't need to get there ourselves. But there was a project by Karma Punso in the framework of the Endangered Archives project under the heading of the British Library, under which actually many collections were gathered and digitized in Bhutan and this material was made accessible and now we can use this material. And then most importantly, we work in the central Himalayas and that's also the focus of my own research in Dolpo and in Mustang. And here, also not alone, as Christian has said at the beginning, I was very lucky in summer 2017. Christian invited me to join him on this research trip to Upper Mustang. Specifically, we were heading to this monastery of Namgyal, as located in far up in the north of Upper Mustang, very close to the capital Lomantang, also very close to the Tibetan border. And in these areas, Christian was documenting different monastic objects, different monastic collections. And he noted already a couple of years back, so he was looking into all sorts of objects, into statues, tankas, musical instruments, but also into books. And he noted at this specific place in Namgyal that there's important collection of about 200 old Tibetan books. He made the first documentation of that. And among these volumes, there's one strata of texts, 43 volumes, which is significantly older than the rest of the texture material. And Christian, he noted immediately the importance of this material and he started slowly digitizing it. And then in summer 2017, we were able to digitize the entire material, meaning digitize every single folio of these 243 volumes. Right. That's a sample manuscript of this collection. I don't know if Christian has showed you samples of these before. You can see immediately why an art historian is interested in this kind of material. It's immensely beautifully illuminated. We find illuminations on every first folio and every last folio of every single volume. So for Christian, this provides him with a rich body of art historical material to work with. I should also say that in stylistic terms all of these volumes are quite similar. Right. Then I, of course, I look at this material from a different perspective. For once, I look at this from a manuscript studies perspective and secondly also from a conjugal studies perspective looking into the contents of these manuscripts. I will start off, first of all, discussing some of the manuscript features of these volumes. One of the immediate gains of doing this is that it gives us a clear estimation where to place these manuscripts in time. And it's important because we literally have otherwise no material kind of, no historiographic material that would help us in this regard. When we do that we can discuss different features. We can, first of all, for example, discuss corticological features. We can, for example, look in which way these folios were numbered and the system of pagination that is used in these manuscripts. Then I don't know how many of you are Tibetan studies people and if you could immediately understand what I'm talking about if you can't read the Tibetan but I hope it will be clear nevertheless. So there's one system of pagination that we find in these it's known from other older Western Tibetan manuscripts where the hundreds of manuscripts of the hundreds that are written on the margins of the folios are indicated through signs of crosses or exits. There's one system here. You find a second system for that I should use the mouse. You find a second system where the hundreds are also indicated through a subscribed letter under the volume letter that also indicates the hundreds. It's a very specific system in other studies. There's a study by Christina Sherra Schaub who studied older Western Tibetan manuscripts. She came up with a certain typology. This would be a system. It would be a type III A and type III B. It's really something that kind of gives us in comparison with other manuscript collections it gives us a clear estimation of the time of these manuscripts. We also find a certain way of ornamentation that is found in these manuscripts. You find these older forms archaic forms of ornamentation on the top of a page with this single wave it's called a goyik or yigo so a letterhead basically that is found in there. We find also something you find an element that looks like an upside down heart. If any of you have seen something like that ever before, I would be quite curious because I've not seen that before in any of the other manuscripts I looked into. I think it's clearly not a heart. It's just a similar shape but it's upside down. But these are features that are easily distinguished from later manuscripts and that's what you see below here. These are similar signs but they're also clearly different with these two wave curls. These are taken from the same volumes but from manuscripts that were replaced at a later time and this is very clear. We also find orthographic features. All of these features are commonly subsumed under the label of old Tibetan orthography. There's a certain form of writing a reverse gigo. It's called a gilok that's here. That's the reverse form and that's the later standard Tibetan form. We find a mayata that's the yata sign that's missing in later standard Tibetan forms. And also that's a letter that's called tatrak that's also missing in later Tibetan forms. And a acchung suffix. It's this letter here that we find in combination with a vowel ending that's only found in this early strata of texts. And you can also see of course that kind of these earlier forms and these later forms are just placed next to each other. I think most decisive in determining the manuscripts are holographic features. There's something that is called horizontal ligatures. It's a certain way in Tibetan language consonants are clustered together. And when they're written they're usually clustered together in the vertical way. In older Tibetan forms they're clustered together in a more horizontal way. You see this in cases like that in case like sa-pa-ta-pa, rata-ta-ta or sa-ta-ta-ta. You see it very nicely here. So that would be the old form that would be the newer form, right? One is more vertical and the other is more horizontal. We could even go down to investigating the shape of individual letters. And also there are significant differences. I've just chosen these two samples, these two letters because the other difference is most easily recognized. So the letters on the gray background these are older letters. You see that for these letter ka and ka kind of this part forms a very strict triangle, right? The kind of the lines touch at one point at the top. The writing on the black background is from a later manuscript I think from the 15th century. There the letters don't do that. They're open. The lines are open at the top. So we do all of that in order to determine the age. I feel it's quite safe to say that these manuscripts that we have in Namgyal are produced at the beginning of the 14th century. Tentatively. But I think I'm quite sure they were not produced later than that. Having a substantial collection of canonical literature from the 14th century is something that is really sensational. That's the other collections that we have as physically existing manuscripts these date to the early 17th century earliest. Something like the van Lee kanje for example. We'll go back 300 years in time. That's just really that in itself is sensational. But rather than the mere dating of the manuscript I think actually the content is also something which is very interesting. And for analyzing the content then we make heavy use of our database. In this database as I've said we kind of try to include information of something like 50 plus kanjos in canonical collections. And the more material we include in this database the more easy it gets to identify any new title that we have and also the more reliable gets this identification. So that's the first thing that what we do with any collection we find we identify the text via the text titles. Once we have done that we have an electronic catalog and we kind of can do an optimized comparison of the title sequence. We'll show you later what that looks like. If we have the time for doing that we are quite precise in the way we do the catalogs. Take note of the chapter headings and even down to the bumper markers that's like a kind of a paragraph marker in these kind of texts. When we do that we can also compare the structure of these texts with the structure of other texts. And of course also we would like to make accessible the original scans the manuscripts itself and by having these and of course we can kind of work on the full text do a more ingrained philological work. But of course this is very laborious work. Having done that for these 43 volumes in Namgyal I can say that what we have in Namgyal roughly looks like that. We have basically two sets of texts. One is a set here in blue that's called in Tibetan Bum. Bum is simply the Tibetan term for 100,000. So it's an abbreviation for the Sanskrit title It's a perfection of wisdom texts in 100,000 verses. And as kind of this number indicates it's a huge text it spreads out over these 14 volumes and it's more or less complete. Every single of these volumes has something between 300 to 400 pages. Right. That's just one single text in terms of comparison therefore it's not so interesting. The other part of the collection is much more interesting. It's label as Dode literally translates as a sutra collection. It's structured in 30 volumes according to the 30 letters of the Tibetan alphabet. We have two volumes that are missing volume 16, volume and volume ha is two in grey these are missing. The others are more or less complete. We have one duplicated volume volume 8 but here the duplicated volume and what we consider the original volume these are quite similar in content but one volume is a bit more damaged than the other and we assume that for this reason it was then exchanged. In these volumes then and for the sutra section we have something between 300 and 350 folios per volume. In terms of texts we have anything between 1 text or 10 texts up to 63 texts in volume. Altogether we have 325 texts and these 325 texts they are ordered in a specific sequence and once we have this catalogue we can compare this sequence with the sequence of other textual collections. That's actually a method that was developed by Bruno Lenier a couple of years back when he was investigating the contents of different conjures and that's a method that I find quite useful for various reasons. It works like that so we do an electronic comparison the first thing we get is a comparative table. This table is then rendered into a graph that looks like that. What you see here in red is the red line here the sequence the order of the dagger conjure of the dagger canon is the conjure that is mostly used in conjure studies and for every single text then the relative placement in the Namgyal collection is given. That means if one text is placed earlier in Namgyal the graph would go up if another text is placed later the graph would go down if the text is not there in Namgyal then there would be a gap and when we then now look at this distribution we need these tables in order to be able to interpret the graph it actually tells us a lot about the content of a collection very quickly if we know how these collections are structured for example we know that these gaps are to be found in specific places so we know for example the Vinaya section is completely missing in Namgyal we also know the Pratna Paramita section is almost completely missing apart one text this is the Shatha Sahasriya Pratna Paramita we know also these are the gaps here that most of the texts that are included in the Rathnakuta collections and Avatamsika collections are not there we also see this kind of would be the Sutra section of the conjure of the Dalai Khandja that would be the Tantra section of the Dalai Khandja so we see even though this collection is termed as a Sutra section there is actually a lot of Tantric material that is included in this Namgyal material quite surprisingly also this is also a Tantra section none of the texts of the first ten volumes of the Tantra section of the Dalai Khandja is included there the Tantric texts that we find in Namgyal are mostly Dharanis no Tantras as such there is one thing tell us something about the content the other thing is about the relationships if the order if the graph the comparative graph is so irregular we can be very sure that there were no historic relationships between these two collections in terms of how they are ordered it's important to understand that point it's just comparing the order it does not say anything about the texts themselves but of course we kind of assume if there is a closer relationship in terms of order it might be an indication I come back to this comparative method later I just want to mention also bits and pieces of unusual things that I noted unusual only if we talk in terms of mainstream Khandja traditions as I said before there is this division between Khandja and Tantra so one would be the collection ascribed to the Buddha and the other one to human authors here in the Sutra section of Namgyal there are also two texts that were composed by human authors that's the Chattakamala by Aryashura and the Saptakumarikavadana by Gopadatta that's highly unusual for Khandjas in the mainstream traditions it's not unusual for the textual connections of that network it's also found in similar collections that I will talk about later the other point I mentioned already there are also some works which we which we don't know so far they are all together six titles which I was not able to spot in any of the Khandjas of the mainstream traditions it's a rather big Mayan Sutra it's secondly a praise to Buddha Maitreya then another smaller praise then another short Mayan Sutra two small Dharanis about the first text I was a bit it's actually in the preparation for the talk I was getting a bit suspicious I thought how could it be that such a big Sutra is not found in the other Khandjas and I looked more closely and I found it's just a title that is not found I checked for the text a rather similar version is actually found in the in the Diage Canon there is this text number 134 but it's listed under a completely different title for the other texts I'm very sure I checked also for the texts these are not included in any of the major collections that we know so far so it's quite important these collections here in the Himalayan borderlands they might be seen as treasures really where texts are preserved that otherwise we would not be aware of alright so we could play this comparative game and that's the game since it's optimized we can do this very fast and easily and it kind of tells us where to look more closely and you see if we do another comparison with another catalogue we see something interesting so the parallel placement for this later section here that's a comparison with the early Mustang catalogue the early Mustang catalogue is based on a manuscript that was found in the Mugu district rather close to Dolpo and to Mustang it's also found at least a fragment of it it's found in the Namta of another rather famous figure it's found in Namta of Ngorchen Kunga Sangpo Ngorchen was a figure was very active in the Mustang area in the 15th century of Kanjer producing projects we don't know whether this catalogue corresponds to any collection but we assume that at least this was the case in earlier times right so we have these parallels here in the later part and these parallels are easily understood if you kind of map on the contents of the the sections of the early Mustang Kanjer these similarities are only for one specific section namely for a section that is called in the early Mustang catalogue the Sutra section various Sutras we see again there's Tantric material from Darani's Sung is the Tibetan term for Darani from these Darani's collections but there are no parallels here in terms of placement also nothing from the Gyu section from the Tantra section is found in Namgyal when we first noticed that then our first idea was that actually what we have in Namgyal must be seen as a fragment of a Kanjer right we basically thought it's a Sutra section of a Kanjer and the other parts were either never produced fully or they went missing over time that was kind of our first instinct and that still would be a possible explanation I think another explanation is more likely and that has to do with rather recent findings with findings from another expedition to Dolpo in last summer in summer 2018 what we now assume and I will explain that later more detail we assume that the Namgyal collection that existed actually earlier before Kanjer's kind of in this fully fledged Kanjer's in this 14th century Bhutan model before these ideas were introduced to Mustang right as I said before Ngorchen Kunga Sampo he was very influential in that regard in the 15th century only and then the idea would be then that collections like the Namgyal collection would be incorporated into these Kanjer's that would be also one way to interpret some of the comments that we find in the biographies of Ngorchen right it said that when he came to Mustang in the 15th century there was no complete Kanjer available at that place and for that reason he had to kind of produce a new Kanjer set and he was taking the different parts of what's supposed to form a full Kanjer from different areas right the Tantra section he took from Sakya and the other sections he took from other places to see that Namgyal was one of these places where he got a substantial collection which he could incorporate into a fully-fledged Kanjer right as I've said kind of these indications came from another expedition from last year last year we traveled to Dolpo it's very close to Mustang again far up in the north in a town called Bitsche but accessible only from the Nepalese side it's actually a rather long track it needs a week-long track to get to that place and there's one rather famous monastery at this place Nesa Gompa or Nesa Monastery and this place houses a real treasure of Tibetan manuscripts this house is altogether a treasure of about 640 old Tibetan manuscripts what you see here on the picture is just a third of the entire library this treasure was noted already more than 15 years back by Klaus Dietermates but also by Amy Heller and Amy Heller in 2009 she produced the first catalogue of this collection and in this catalogue she made clear that what we have stored here at one place are actually the collections of three different monasteries we have one collection that belongs to Lang Monastery of 98 volumes and we have two smaller collection two substantial collections one which is called a Nesa Kanjur a canonical collection there of 103 volumes and a massive collection of various sets of this boom literature of 361 volumes and then 69 volumes then a smaller collection from a temple called the Selkang of 71 volumes in 2013 and 2014 then the RKDS project approached the head lamb of that monastery and he was asked if he could provide a photograph, a scans of a canonical set from that monastery and he agreed and he did so and he delivered us to the set of manuscripts of 88 volumes and it looked roughly like a Kanjur like a Kanjur we know from the 14th century in this Bhutan model what he did however and that's something we noted only when we traveled to the place and spoke to the lama what he did is that he had this model of a Bhutan Kanjur of a fully fledged Kanjur in mind and then he took, he chose from all of these volumes at his disposal to create such a Kanjur so in historical terms it was a completely artificial collection that never belonged together in itself of course also all of these manuscripts are historically close related but they never formed this single collection that is something we noted only when we were there at this place but then we noted among these volumes that were photographed by the lama which clearly pointed out that some connections some structural setup that looked very similar to what we have found in Namgyal and all of these volumes were coming from one single collection and this was the lang collection of 98 volumes and then last summer we digitized this entire collection completely about 20 by 5 volumes we had already so we digitized the rest of the collection also there we have the first catalogue and you can see immediately so it's a very similar structural setup to what we have seen in Namgyal it's also a section that is titled as a sutra section an extensive sutra collection it's also structured in 30 volumes on most of the volumes you will find on the cover page you will find an indication this volume is part of the sutra section these are the volumes marked here in purple and there are some volumes which were the first cover pages missing but I assume kind of based on stylistic considerations but also in looking into the contents I assume that all of these volumes belong to that one collection it's complete and you see also we have more texts than we have in Namgyal we have 421 texts so we have many more texts and this is easily explained because there is one volume which is missing in Namgyal volume 29 we have 135 texts in this single volume alone it's a volume full of rather obscure and very small daranese and many of these are not identified we see the same parallel developments if we do this automated comparison we see very significant parallels in the order you can also see that individual texts or you can also see that individual volumes are placed differently but over and all there is a very clear connection there is one major gap and of course this gap is easily explained it's just this one single volume volume 29 which is missing in the Namgyal collection we can also do again the comparison to early mustang we see the same parallel in the sutra section and we see again that just the lang collection and the textual material and all of these additional texts are coming from these sungdu and sungbum from these daranese sections right so doing that we can be very sure that there are very close connections between these two these three collections Namgyal lang collection and also the early mustang catalog what we also know is that there are equally close connections in Ladakh this is something that was investigated in earlier times already by Helmut Tauschen by Bruno Le Né there are a couple of fragmentary collections for once at Hemis Monastery and the other place is at Basco I will not kind of discuss any of that in detail but just to show you at one glance again that you see there are these important parallels in terms of how these collections are ordered Helmut Tauschen and Bruno Le Né they have written an article about that in 2005 but they of course were only able to speak about these collections and not about this new material from Namgyal and Lang right kind of slowly I would kind of like to come to an end and for the end I would like to come back to the question I started discussing earlier namely the question really what we find here what we found in Namgyal and in Lang specifically whether it is possible to conceive of that material as being fragments of conjures or whether really this should be seen as kind of forming an independent form of Canon or kind of a different form of Canon that we simply were not aware of and as I said we need much more now to the second option and I do so based on a closer investigation of this material from Lang so you remember at Lang we had 98 volumes it's a very conspicuous size of volumes number of volumes in conjure terms most of the conjures we know of they contain something about 100 volumes and that also was the first instinct we thought we expected to find a conjure there or fragment of a conjure if we now look more closely no conjure will emerge there is no conjure to be found there what we find instead is a clear focus on these two elements on suitor volumes door volumes and on boom volumes on prachna paramita sets so of these 98 volumes we have 61 suitor volumes before I have just spoken about this one single set the set here in the middle there's one set which is complete of 30 volumes it's called Dori Kepa and I roughly placed this in time tentatively really in the 14th to the 15th century and also we have one set which is earlier it's just a fragment it's six volumes that could be produced something like 50 to 100 years earlier I think and then we have another set that's almost complete of 25 volumes these volumes actually have been produced over a longer stretch of time all of these volumes most of these volumes were donated by individual sponsors and I would say they were produced something between the 15th and the 17th century and this dating is really to be taken with more than a grain of salt I'm pretty sure about the relative dating though and also while it looks like a very strict division between these three sets on the ground it's much more messy we see that individual folios have been exchanged between these different sets but I think it roughly looks like that and then the second focus we have we have 23 boom volumes they are even more messy than the Suta volumes my guess is they are from at least three different sets it could be even more and again kind of being produced in a spectrum between the 13th and the 16th centuries and then other canonical material we find there is actually quite limited there are only 13 other volumes which are other canonical materials there is one getung there is one doksung one sutra, one dharani collection there are four copies of the Vajracetika there are two volumes which are labeled as kyu or tantra and there are five volumes which are also prasna paramet literature and this important among these 13 of other canonical volumes most of them have been produced much later than the Suta volumes so most of them are something past the 16th century in terms of production and also two non-cononical volumes one zambum volume and one namta one biography so the point really is here when we look at the lang collection then that there is a clear focus only on these two aspects sutra volumes or sutra sets and boom sets and this is the same focus, it's the same structure that we found in Namgyal it's just that and interestingly we took just a very brief look at these collections but there are two other places one is Shea Monastery also in Dolpo and another one is a private collection in Saldang also close to this area in Dolpo where we find very similar collections collections that are made up entirely just of that sutra sets and boom sets so I think really kind of my guess is that what we have here is that these are forms of kind of a canon of Tibetan literature that had been taken shape at a time prior to the time in the 15th century when kind of this idea of fully fledged kanja was introduced in this area and it also had continued this idea to live on rather long we have cases then where the kanja idea was more dominating and these sutras, sutra collections were integrated into kanjas but we have also other places like these two places I just quoted where these sutra sets were produced at later times the other places my rough guess would be these sutra sets were produced in the 16th and 17th centuries alright in terms of a conclusion let me just kind of provide you with a very brief summary of the main issues it's very clear that these collections that we find in these western and central Himalayan borderlands in these collections of Namgyal, early Mustang Lang, Hemis and Vasco that these are not to be seen as local kanjas or local connections but really definitely they are part of a larger textual network that stretches out between Ladakh Dolpo and Mustang that's rather extensive geographical area I talked about these connections mostly in terms of structure and all of these comparative graphs we could do also a more fine-grained textual analysis that's something that's actually much more boring to talk about but we did this at least we probed into that and we also quite safe to say that we find similarly close connections also on a textual level so this we know for sure there are also a couple of open questions which we would like to understand in a better way and this is of course how these collections we know they are connected but we don't know how exactly they are connected we know how to roughly place them historically but we don't understand exactly how to trace the textual relationships and of course there's something for which a semantic analysis would be one way of solution but that's something I think eventually that we or someone should do then the other issue is that we have to see which other collections could be connected to the network I mentioned already these places in Saldan and in Shea we find similar collections of course also we have to look at the other collections housed at Nessa Gumpa the Nessa collections and the Serkan collections and if then we are able to investigate more of these collections I think it should also provide us with a more definitive answer to this question is it still possible that these collections are part of conjures or really are they is it very clear that they are to be seen as a kind of independent canon that was there before the conjure and then lastly we need to investigate the relationships between this textual network the western and central Himalayan network and then the central Tibetan mainstream traditions the texts of the Zalpa and Tangpangma group and there's one interesting study in that regard a text critical study of the Manchushri Manchushri Vihara Sutra was done by James Apple in 2014 and for that study he compared I think 22 different conjures witnesses of textual witnesses of 22 different conjures and used also material from Hamis and Basco and in his conclusion he said it's safe to say that what we have in Hamis and Basco that this is part of a separate western Tibetan tradition and he thinks also it's a textual strata that is older than the textual strata that we see represented in the later central Tibetan mainstream witnesses this is just one single text but of course it leads us to speculate if it's possible that really these collections of 300 to 400 texts that we have here in the Himalayan borderlands if it's possible that really they contain texts that are much older than the textual witnesses that we used so far and again that would be quite a sensation but again that's something that we can speculate about that but more research needs to be done in order to verify or to falsify the speculation with these kind of thoughts I would like to conclude I thank you very much for your patience and listening to all of that and really I'm very curious in hearing your feedback and hearing your ideas on that thanks there will be some questions about this I thought one one thing you could try to kind of summarize a little bit is the relationship of the printed versus the hand written ones because I think the important aspect is that these are all hand written but of course not all the ones that we have listed are printed you mean the ones we digitized newly are the ones kind of we all of them kind of just to give an idea what's the difference in terms of methodology or relationship but obviously it's an easier way or once printing comes in I think that just changes in a way right you see where I want to go right no of course the obvious assumption is that it gets stabilized because much more it takes much more work of course to order printing blocks it costs much more money and then of course one version could be distributed and reproduced many times so kind of with the usage of printing technology that's kind of a major rising factor in conjurer studies I thought I have that here but there's one part of our website where we indicate what is a manuscript collection and what is a printed collection but I don't have that here as I said this could explain texture variation which kind of could be bigger here in these different countries which were really until recently written by hand I mean they had paper making technology and everything quite sophisticated but printing technology then was introduced much later in these areas the question is in the subject of very ignorant about all of this but two things in particular about handwritten collections and manuscripts the first question would be is there any evidence of similarities or dissimilarities in terms of layout so Lungas had the contents what was exactly in the collections but for example the way that the pages presented a number of lines I'm talking from a Chinese perspective for example there was some kind of regularity in terms of how many columns and how many characters the column and so on so even where the collection would be different you can see that there was some kind of pattern behind the idea of how the should be considered do we have anything like that again? there's actually there's one interesting study that should be published in a braille volume rather soon by a Chinese I think a Taiwanese student I think his name is Shen Yuli I can't remember clearly but what he did is he did exactly that and he investigated kind of the format and the layout of different conjures printed conjures actually and it was quite interesting because I think no one ever did this before and kind of the the stemmer that he developed from looking into that was pretty similar to the stemmer that we have kind of from a text critical analysis from a logical analysis so that really is interesting what I noted you know I was talking about kind of rather fine-grained textual differences so basically what I did is I take note whenever I find something weird when I do a catalogue and I kind of I try to see if the same weird thing is found in other catalogues and then you find on these kind of similarities there would be a break-off in a page there would be a paragraph break, a different design on one single page and you could find these also kind of you know you could see this mapped onto other collections which you know there's no other explanation than really that has been done by copying right I mean there's no other logical explanation for doing that we find rather down to something kind of corrections, spelling mistakes miscounting of individual chapters, something like that so all of that is reproduced yeah I think one immediate guess would be it has to do with the institutional institutionalism not getting the word kind of building up of institutions one would assume that in this area institutionalized Buddhism was not so strong that in other areas right and for that reason then the Vinaya kind of a monastic conduct monastic law was not so important than in later times and that's also quite interesting really kind of in Mustang kind of this major monasticism takes often with kind of beginning of the 15th century and of course then that's when you know these patrons from Central Tibet were invited like Moachen you know they built up these monasteries but also they bring in these intellectual ideas and with them they bring in these other textual collections like the Vinaya so you don't think it's possible perhaps that the Vinaya was there already is it a want to put it down that I think kind of that the Vinaya was there transmitted orally that I think can be excluded I'm pretty sure about that it still could be that there are other collections that were there in these places but there are no traces of them right it could be of course that's very interesting you showed the illustrated first pages and they have the circles for that punch mark do all the pages have the circles or any of the cover pages when we study manuscripts it's often mentioned as an ornamentation but I think really it should be rather considered as kind of drawing the layout of a page so all of them have these circles and this of course a format you know kind of I mean all of Tibetan Buddhism is usually inspired is drawing from Indian models but it's one of these typical features that we see they have these punch marks here they're useless right you know what they were used for in format times right it comes from the Indian body format from palm leaves which had a hole in the middle and then volumes were bound together with a string and then if you take a look at earlier Tibetan material like if you go back to like 12 centuries manuscripts you will see these are bigger sometimes they're also not ornamented but they're bigger holes in there and we wonder if they were still in use but at that time really definitely they were not in use anymore you can't fit a string in there many of them also are not pierced anymore and if you stack them on top of each other it doesn't match so it's just kind of this you know it's remembering the Indian format a follow up as to how they're stored so do they all have the ornament or wooden holes are those contemporary or are they later they they have them but then it's difficult to say kind of which you know there's also an exchange of boards because as soon as you open a manuscript you can exchange these things and actually Kristin you will do research and kind of which board belongs to which one you write which is a certain problem but of course since we have a huge collection it stays no way around that there must be boards that belong to that collection and the suspicion is that the one group one relatively big group of boards in now there is just ornamented on one side on the front side with quite my early colleagues and otherwise just on the other side that is the one that belongs to this early collections but I don't they don't have volume signatures as later ones so we can't reconstruct kind of which volume they belong to and so in that sense but I look into it more for the Paris France actually I was more interesting knowing about the dating strategy you performed for several set of sutras you say the set is from the 14th and the other sets from 14th to 15th is it only that geographical difference or you can find out in that it's from that century it's only a difference of one century it's really something I should emphasise you can't take any of these states for granted for once because I'm just starting with this type of research that's something that needs a lot of experience you need to take a look at different material in order to get a better grasp of that but I kind of by the time I'm just talking about one half years looking at these manuscripts but I've looked at several 10,000 40 years of manuscripts and I kind of feel one gets a better understanding at least about the relative dating about the absolute date I still accept there could be shifts for dating we could basically there's a couple of things we can do we can do a C14 analysis that's something we have not done so far for various reasons one reason is of course because it's religiously important material that we document on the site and that's not a good place to chop off a piece of the manuscript especially if we're not very sure what we want to achieve by that but I think in future that will be an aspect that we would like to include perhaps by trying to collect things that fall apart anyway but that's something I feel I'm quite hesitant about that and also we should be clear about if we do C14 dating what it gets us is usually for that period 200 years with kind of a reliability curve right but really it's 200 years I'm also sure about 200 years there's no question about that so that's I think it should be considered additionally but one also has to be clear about the limitations of that it will not give you a precise date just because there's a natural science background to it and then it's always 200 years it's just for certain centuries a certain period especially I think because you look into 11th century, 12th century is not a good time for C14 right a little later it's better then it becomes bad again for a while so it really depends where you want to be with C14 and on how the curve is actually running that it's calibrated against I think so far the most precise system of dating is really looking to colophones but there also you expect more, you hope for more for more reliable historical information we will read through a colophone seminar on Saturday you will see they're not so precise as one wishes for but that could be I think in kind of more precise dating I think that would be the one of the key systems and then I really think and again specifically for this time frame I think a closer investigation of paleographical developments will also kind of give us a clear estimation of date but that's something that for that period has not been done so far points or relatively fixed points and what kind of compares them in the different features that we have shown and the lesser archaic features that occur the more later you make it that's kind of simplified that's the thing we find all of these features next to each other and then kind of by the degree of something is there very often or not so often we kind of get an estimation where it could be placed what I think, what I hope for that kind of these paleographic considerations that we will be able to establish a more clear cut of date because there's a clear shift I think, I would like to argue for that between a certain way of earlier writing in the later form of writing I think that this shift happened sometime between the 14th and the 15th century that's earlier, that's later and that's 15th century and I think that's 14th century but again I think there's a division to be established but then doesn't tell us anything about afterwards, 16th century we would have other problems then and 13th century because the writing didn't change much between kind of the 12th to the 14th century how well they were inviting this so these letters are so similar to each other and through the entire collection through all the letters almost it's quite remarkable please you've told us about very interesting talk, thank you very much but you're telling us about the pedagraphic features of the two-chair script but I can see on the manuscript that you've got who made there and I can't read it because you're far away but my interest was whether there's anything in comparison between those two scripts that are actually on the manuscript are you are you talking about these things here that's a form of Ume we find different notes on these manuscripts the thing is I must say I don't know anything about the development of Ume during that time and I think hardly anyone knows anything about that it's kind of I have some kind of an estimation of what is a bit earlier what is a bit later I think many of the comments you see there in Ume are added later we see also kind of notes added in Uchen you see a note here thank you Dago it has been revised and is proper now that's a part of producing a manuscript a manuscript collection a proper revision process and I assume that we have these Uchen comments Uchen notes these are part of this proper a revision process, textual corrections and they are all over these manuscripts and I would tentatively assume that the other notes here they are from a later stage but when exactly from here I don't know I can kind of confirm that I study the illuminations in relation to their descriptions and it's very clear that these have been added to it not by the same people and not knowing more what it actually depicted which is quite interesting the interpretations apparently things got lost between and then somebody decided to add their identifications to it but they weren't always correct so they are not definitely not from the same time they wouldn't have in this case but yeah Ume is sometimes used in other manuscripts and written ones Namgile is a fantastic Sakyat manuscript collection in there for example but there is much more being canonized in a way in terms of hand baking you see also as I was looking for that before you see kind of slight forms of Ume influence in there that would be the other form but I think that's really a different thing that's part of these horizontal ligatures of this kind of writing clearly the manuscript itself has been lined presumably for the scribe to actually keep its line so it's obviously unoriginal it's obviously the way that they're doing it but you can see who made that but are there any other scripts there do you find any mar any mar the sort of simple you find all sort of things you find for example you find drawings you find notes in Ume or different types of Ume or Yuki whatever we need a very good exercise we can take a little bit of text and just copy it from all kinds of stuff you can basically see that these manuscripts were in use right you can see that they were touched you can see that they were recited you can kind of see where they were touched you can see I will talk about that in Paris about these notes you can kind of see how people interact with books you can see sometimes they were used to drop a note to a colleague things we do you can see they were used as writing materials training, writing, training the alphabet training copying copying phrases from the text below I think you can also make a point that this is done on that side when you sit down and recite a text you have one facing towards you and not the other one and there you have more notes than on the other side so you could see how people work with these texts related to that I have another question if you look at the pagination before the pagination there is sang in this case which is an abbreviation of the title which is starts with bakpa sang da and so on so they used the first one or two cylinders from the title to indicate on the margin were text which was for me when I started kind of cataloging that was extremely useful because I could just check for that mic and when it changed I have to check for the new beginning of the new text but this for me it was the first time that I even saw that how frequent is that I can't actually tell because I never looked in a comparative perspective I think this is found in other in other instances as well yeah one last question before it's more of a comment it's interesting that you said that these texts show signs of being used quite considerably because certainly some contemporary learners complain these days that nobody ever looks at the candor anymore so that's kind of interesting when when used I mean really I do not mean they were studied right we can also see traces of studying we can find for example annotational remarks but these are rather limited but rather I think they were used in a ritual context of reciting these texts it's usually once in a year that they recite the entire thing but that's it and sometimes it was like they also carried it around the village to protect the village that's essentially the two main usages of these collections what I think is interesting especially about the question of if they are distinctive collections if we look at whatever the historical information that we have in the past that put a Muga Kingdom is that besides establishing the temple they had certain text corpuses copied and they kind of listed in a way as if they would be independent and so the question is how much does that relate to that habit that essentially when you found the temple as the word of the Buddha there the minimum is some prasana parameter some boom and then if you have more means of course you may add to that I mean also these findings where we have clearly kind of collections that are different from countries these kind of draw new light to these western Tibetan collections for example in Basco we know there is one kanja but it has been compiled as a kanja only in the 20th century it was separate collections before right so only then kind of the kanja idea became so strong that people would piece that together so one could of course also try to undo that again to see kind of which pieces were there before thank you very much thanks