Some Remarks on the Textual Transmission and Text of Bu ston

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speaking of blockprinting and not of printing by movable type, the
introduction of printing in the huge area dominated by Tibetan culture
was unable to have the profound impact this "new" technology
had upon its introduction in fifteenth century Europe. The relatively
[not absolute!] scarcity of natural resources such as wood for the
printing blocks and paper for printing, and their attendant relatively
high cost, may also have been sufficiently prohibitive for its widespread
use and no doubt exerted negative pressures on its development.
These factors notwithstanding, it is worth briefly to pause before
the circumstance that until the twentieth century only very, very
few Tibetan literati ever deigned to write anything in the vernacular.
And it is fair to say that, throughout the history of Tibetan writing of
some thirteen hundred years, 39 there was, with some noteworthy early
examples, virtually no secularization of Tibetan letters. The result
of this was that the hegemony of monks and men of the cloth in general
and the rule by petty dictators, benign and malignant, never
came under a real threat by the introduction and dissemination of
ideas that were different from the monochromatic idealogy of a certain
kind of Buddhism in particular in which the secular and the religious
were inextricably intertwined. Their violent replacement was
to come from the outside in 1959.
Given the above comments in point form, it should now not be
surprising that the text of the Chos 'byung also fell victim to the various
pitfalls of transmissive corruption. Though critical of several
other points in Bu ston's work, there is only one occasion where, for
example, Dpa' bo II Gtsug lag phreng ba (1504-66) found it necessary
explicitly to point out that there was a problem with a reading of the
print to which he had access. We now know that this must have been
the Zhwa lu print of the early 1470s and I will return to his remarks
below very shortly. Gser mdog Paṇ chen most likely also used this
print for his remarks in his 1502 history of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist
logic and epistemology. 40 This is of course not to say that he was unfamiliar
with the Chos 'byung prior to its Zhwa lu "publication." He
most definitely was. The biographical and autobiographical litera-
39
40
For a penetrating reexamination of the beginnings of Tibetan writing, see now S.
van Schaik, "A New Look at the Tibetan Invention of Writing," New Studies of the
Old Tibetan Documents: Philology, History and Religion, Old Tibetan Documents
Online Monograph Series, vol. III, ed. Y. Imaeda, M.T. Kapstein and T. Takeuchi
(Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo
University of Foreign Languages, 2011), 45-96, but see also, albeit with very serious
reservations, Grong khang Tshe ring chos rgyal, Gangs can yig srol ‘phel rim
skor gyi gleng gtam yid kyi rang sgra, passim.
Tshad ma'i mdo dang bstan bcos kyi shing rta'i srol rnams ji ltar byung ba'i tshul gtam
du bya ba nyin mor byed pa'i snang bas dpyod ldan mtha' dag dga' bar byed pa, Complete
Works, vol. 19 (Thimphu, 1975), 27.