Imperial Postscript to the Tangut, Chinese and Tibetan Editions of the dhāraṇī-sūtras in the Collection of the IOM, RAS

Abstract

Three parallel editions of dhāraṇī-sūtras in Tangut, Chinese and Tibetan languages were published in the Tangut state in 1149. The Tibetan edition is of particular importance, because until recently specimens of printing in Tibetan, that could belong to an earlier date, have not been found anywhere. All the editions are equal in terms of their contents and contain the postscript written by the Emperor Renzong. The main goal of the article is to introduce the previously unpublished Tibetan text of the postscript in correspondence with the Tangut and Chinese versions. Besides, the article provides information about the study, preservation state, and codicology of all the three editions.

Full Text

During the long reign of the Emperor Renzong of Western Xia (1139–1193) the propagation of Buddhism in the Empire, including translation and publication activities, reached its heights. Colophons of Tangut texts state that various Buddhist texts were published in Tangut, Chinese and Tibetan in thousands of copies for distribution among the participants of the national Dharma assemblies (Solonin 2015, 849). However, currently we have at our disposal only one example of such an edition in all the three languages, that survived to our time. Namely, this is the Avalokiteśvara dhāraṇī-sūtra and Uṣṇīṣavijayā dhāraṇī-sūtra, provided with the postscript written by the Emperor Renzong himself. The books were published in 1149, the first year of the new reign period, “Heavenly prosperity” (for the Tibetan edition this date is applicable with a high degree of probability, for reasons discussed below). The Tibetan edition is of particular importance, because until recently specimens of printing in Tibetan, that could belong to an earlier date, have not been found anywhere. ¹

The book (under the call number Kh. Tib. 67) became famous thanks to the Hermitage exhibition “Lost Empire of the Silk Road”, that was held from June 25 to October 31, 1993 in Switzerland with the support of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation. ² In 1996, the exhibition catalogue was published in Chinese (Xiaoshi de wanguo 1996), thus introducing Kh. Tib. 67 to scholars from China and Japan. During the first decade of the new century they made a significant contribution to the study of this block print.

In 2004 Shirai Satoko published an article on the first of the three texts of Kh. Tib. 67 (see the Table “Contents of the Editions” below), namely, the Avalokiteśvara dhāraṇī-sūtra. She made the transliteration of the Tibetan text and its translation into Japanese and described the linguistic features of this version of the text in comparison with its variants from the Beijing and Derge canons (Shirai 2004).

Tangutologist Shi Jinbo in his article “A brief study of the earliest Tibetan block prints” (Shi, 2005) paid special attention to Kh. Tib. 67 (as well as Kh. Tib. 63/68) as the example of “butterfly”-binding. Speaking about its contents, he expressed the opinion that Kh. Tib. 67 could contain numerous descriptions of rituals. He identified the first text, giving its name in Chinese, and mentioned the translator Jayānanda, whose name is found in the colophon of the second text.

Unlike the dhāraṇī-sūtras, that became a subject of textual analysis conducted by Shirai Satoko and Duan Yuquan (Duan 2010), the Tibetan text of the Imperial postscript (more precisely, its fragments) has never been published. Prof. Lin Ying-chin greatly contributed to the study of the Tangut and Chinese texts of the postscripts, making their collation and interlinear translation into Chinese (Lin 2011). However, she did not use the Tibetan text and her work is not easily accessible to non-Chinese speakers.

Saya Hamanaka, the co-author of this article, made a translation of the Tangut text of the Imperial postscript into English. We introduce the translation by a brief overview of the important issues connected with the study, preservation state, and codicology of all the three editions.

Establishing the Connection

Between the Tangut, Chinese and Tibetan Editions

The article written by Shen Weirong, based on his report at the Paris seminar “Edition, éditions: l’écrit au Tibet, évolution et devenir” in May 2008, turned out to be a breakthrough on the establishing the connection between the editions. He indicated the existence of the Chinese equivalent for the Tibetan book (Shen, 2010). He was also the first to identify the second text of the collection as a version of the Uṣṇīṣavijayā dhāraṇī-sūtra that has not been preserved in the existing editions of the Tibetan Buddhist canon. He did not describe the third text of the collection (the postscript) in any detail, since it was beyond the scope of his interests. However, the call numbers of the corresponding Chinese block prints in the St. Petersburg collection (TK-164 and TK-165) indicated by him would suffice to get the missing information from the catalogue of L.N. Menshikov.

Meanwhile, as it later became clear, the Tangut collection of the IOM, RAS disclosed the book completely identical to TK-164 and TK-165 — Tang. 109 (old inv. No. 6796, 6821). The connection between Tang. 109 and the Chinese block prints TK-164 and TK-165 was revealed and described by Tatsuo Nishida in the introduction to “The Catalogue of Tangut Buddhist Texts” (Kychanov 1999: XXV–XXVI). The colophon of Tang. 109 mentions the exact date of the edition: “... the text was distributed to the people by Emperor Ren-xiao I title 1 / in the first year under the reign title of Heavenly Prosperity under the cyclic signs of Snake-Earth (in 1149)” (Kychanov 1999: 581; see also our translation of the postscript)³. Nishida rightfully assumed that the same dating is applicable to the Chinese edition, where the corresponding part of the postscript is lost.

Summarizing the above, the connection between the Chinese and Tibetan editions was declared by the Chinese researcher Shen Weirong. However, he was unaware of the existence of the exact Tangut counterpart, containing the date of the publication (year 1149). According to K. Schaeffer, Shen Weirong in his report gave the exact year 1153 (Schaeffer 2009: 9, 165–166), the reasons for giving this particular date remain unclear.

The first clearly articulated reference unifying together the three editions was made in the article written by the Tangutologist Duan Yuquan (Duan 2010: 29). Following the indications of Shen Weirong, he used Kh. Tib. 67 in the study of certain aspects of the Tangut version of the Uṣṇīṣavijayā dhāraṇī-sūtra. He worked with particular fragments of the Tibetan block print, namely the right side of f. 49 and ff. 50–53.

The history of the studies on this Tibetan block print and its Tangut and Chinese counterparts has been discussed in greater detail in an article written by Alexander Zorin and Alla Sizova (Zorin, Sizova, 2019a). Beyond that, the authors found out that all Tibetan block-printed fragments, that received different call numbers at the time of the formation of the Tibetan collection of the texts from Khara-Khoto — Kh. Tib. 63, 64, 67, 68 — belong to the same edition. While Kh. Tib. 64 was immediately connected to Kh. Tib. 67 and was never treated as something different, the two other items appeared separately in the academic literature. Meanwhile, they make up two fragments of the whole, the part of the dhāraṇī-sūtra of Uṣṇīṣavijayā, that consists purely of sacred Buddhist formulae that are traditionally believed to have a great magical power. These fragments are absent among the folios of Kh. Tib. 67, so it can be assumed that they were extracted by the owner of the book for making an amulet, etc. However, one cannot be completely sure of this assumption because of some differences in sizes of the folios of Kh. Tib. 67 and Kh. Tib. 63/68. The scope of the extant Tibetan text was extended by identifying the item Or. 8212/1914 kept at the collection of A. Stein in the British Library (Takeuchi 1997–1998: No. 674) as part of the edition. Finally, in 2019, in the process of inventorying the Serindian collection of the IOM RAS, a small fragment of the block print was found, that was the left part of f. 39 (based on the comparison of the fragment with the manuscript Kh. Tib. 126 containing text 2). Another page, that should be attributed to Kh. Tib. 63/68 (identified as the left side of f. 40), was among the disjointed fragments in the Tibetan collection of the IOM, RAS. It was published by H. Stoddard (based on a photograph provided by V.L. Uspensky) (Stoddard 2010: 364).

Contents of the Editions

No.	Title
1