Report On Kanjur Of Ta Pho

Author(s): Ernst Steinkellner
Publisher: Ernst Steinkellner

Page 11

other hand do not allow the application of such simple schemes with complete certainty. Additional categories will also have to be found and applied in order to gain a chronology of the writing. The Ta pho library may well be just large enough that something of the sort could be discovered after closer, perhaps even statistical, investigation.
For the time being, however, I'm inclined to take the occurrence of all or of a majority of the above peculiarities, together with the sort of paper, which I think to be the oldest (cf. above, fn. 26), as an indication for a dating to the earliest period of the monastery's, or the area's, writing offices, i.e. from the 11th century A.D.
Miniatures are rather rare, and none have been found in manuscripts assumed to belong to the earliest period. Sometimes the space reserved for a miniature is still empty. All miniatures were photographed.
5. A Note on Volume Signatures
In his remarks on manuscript finds from Guge, H. Eimer notes for the first time a peculiar kind of 'signature' ('Kennsiglum') on the folios besides the pagination (Eimer 1991: 254). This signature consists in most cases of two letters, one atop the other, the lower sometimes slightly shifted to the right. This kind of signature seems to be a characteristic of West Tibetan manuscript writing, for it is used for very many of the folios in the Ta pho library.
Because of the total dispersion of all coherent fragments, it was not possible to identify the meaning of all the letters used in this system. We are able to interpret, however, the most frequent ones on the basis of several sequences of folios counted over the hundred positions.
The following letters were found to occur in the lower position: the three na, na, ma (relatively often), ña (only once), da (twice), ya (once), wazur (once) (32).
Eimer interprets the upper signs as indicating a volume, fascicle or a text within a collection, and thinks that the lower sign indicates, more likely subdivisions of the text rather than hundred units in folio-numeration. But our material clearly shows that only the latter alternative seems to be the case. However, it was possible to determine only the signs for 100, 200 and 300 during the time available.
In some manuscripts (Fig. 5), additional markings by one, two, three vertical strokes or one, two, three small crosses, always made by other hands and mostly in addition to two letter signatures are to be found (33). These additional markings are
(32) There are also several signatures with three letters in vertical order, the third one being always ria. In these three letter signatures, we find in addition colour differences: kha-ria-ra, kha-na-na, kha-ma-na (each once), with the first two letters in red, the last in black; tha-ma-na (once) all red and one kha-ma-yu (?) in red. The meaning of this kind of signatures is still unclear (see Fig. 4).
(3) Fig. 5 comprises some irregularities. Only the second and third examples from the left are typical for the rest of the collection. The others are still enigmatic. The manuscript of the Lalitavistara which was inspected by Klimburg-Salter in Gondhla, Lahul (cf. her report above), shows even a linguistic
[11]
125