Report On Kanjur Of Ta Pho

Author(s): Ernst Steinkellner
Publisher: Ernst Steinkellner

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West provided for centuries a sufficient background to explain the destruction particularly of Buddhist statues, temples, and books (51).
9. Outlook on Future Work
The photographs taken in 1991 of selected materials will first be examined by the members of the team, and from this study a more concrete assessment of the library's philological value should result. After organizing provisions to be made in order to protect the library by encasing, the original manuscripts have to be reconstituted from the dispersed folios. Only then can a sizeable body of early manuscripts from the period before the canonical collection be catalogued and photographed, and thus become available for future philological studies (32).
This library's probable but not yet actually confirmed usefulness for the prehistory of the bKa' 'gyur collections, for the history of single texts mainly of the Ser phyin and mDo man classes, for the history of the Tibetan translation idioms, the development of palaeography, orthography, manuscripts writing styles, manuscript organization and paper production and trade in Western Tibet now remains just a hypothetical assumption. But it is a valid one, and justifies the need for further scholarly work and for careful preservation of this valuable treasure.
That an independent textual tradition existed in Western Tibetan areas until the late 17th century (cf. Eimer 1991: 245-47) was recently demonstrated by M. Hahn's investigation of texts from the manuscript Kanjur of Phudrag (Phug brag) in Ladakh (Hahn 1988). And this is again confirmed by Paul Harrison's recent edition of the Drumakinnararajaparipṛcchäsütra, Tokyo 1992 (cf. particularly pp. XXXII-XXXVII). Moreover, manuscripts seemingly belonging to the ancient periods in style and orthography were found in the area since Francke started to look for such materials (53). More single manuscripts and even collections are still to be identified.
(51) Ta pho itself seems to be mentioned only once specifically in the sources as the place near which 1839 the regent dÑos grub bstan 'dzin was caught in his flight (cf. Datta 1973: 116; Petech 1977: 143). But Spiti was troubled or possibly troubled, e.g., during the expedition of Sultan Zain ul-Abidin before the middle of the 15th century (Petech 1977: 23), during Mirza Haidar's expedition to Tibet of 1533 (ibid.: 27), during its conquest by bKra śis rnam rgyal of Ladakh after the middle of the 16th century (ibid.: 30), during an invasion by armed parties from Kulu' in 1822 (ibid.: 131), and finally during the Dogra period (ibid.: 138 ff.).
While devastation motivated in addition by religious hostility (cf. the note on Ghulam Khan in Francke 1977: 158) may be primarily connected with Moslem soldiery, there is no doubt that Spiti was also subject to invasions by soldiers, bandits and other violent people from Ladakh, e.g. during the tensions between Ladakh and Guge in the times of Sen ge rnams rgyal (ibid.: 41 ff.), when the Ladakhis also seem to have made use of Moslem mercenaries.
(52) The recent development in Kanjur research has been surveyed by Helmut Eimer in his introductory article (Eimer 1992).
(53) Cf. e.g., Francke 1914: 78, 119 f., (b) nos. 1, 18, 19.
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