Some Remarks on the Textual Transmission and Text of Bu ston

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year Khri srong lde btsan's father Khri lde gtsug brtan, alias Mes Ag
tshoms, was killed, one of them, the version published in Beijing,
does claim that his son was eight [= seven] years old when he ascended
the imperial throne as a result of his father's violent death.
For Dpa' bo II, Khri lde gtsug brtan was born in 680. Again, citing a
Sba bzhed, he also has it that he died at the age of sixty-three [= sixtytwo],
that is, in 742. 46 No such figure is found in any of the extant
versions of the Sba bzhed, but he employs it to dismiss its putative
claim that Khri srong lde btsan was born in a hare-year on arithmetic
grounds. On the other hand, in his 1643 chronicle, Dalai Lama V
gives Bu ston the benefit of the doubt for this [mis]dating and, by
exculpating him from any responsibility, is willing to lay the blame
for this date on a scribe's carelessness; we read there: 47
46
47
the Sba bzhed in the following passages of his Bod kyi deb ther dpyid kyi rgyal mo'i
glu dbyangs (Beijing: Mi rigs dpe skrun khang, 1991), 52-4, 60, 62-3, 66 [= Z. Ahmed,
tr., A History of Tibet by Ngag dbang blo bzang rgya mtsho Fifth Dalai Lama of
Tibet, Indiana University Oriental Series, vol. VII (Bloomington: Indiana University
Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1995), 51-2, 58, 61, 65-6]. Each of
these quotations is retrievable from Dpa' bo II's chronicle. Lastly, a very minor
quibble: In spite of the tantalizing parallel Kapstein draws between a narrative of
the Sba bzhed and 1 Kings of the Old Testament, I now do not think it fruitful to
elicit potential confusion when he [and I myself and others!] have rendered Sba
bzhed by Testament of Ba. To my knowledge, the usage of bzhed nowhere remotely
resembles the English usage of "testament," — the term that comes close to this is
bka' chems which he elsewhere [p. 149] does translate as "testament" —, so that
Sba Gsal snang did not write his bzhed, Claim, as a testator. With finely-tuned
eyes for these things, S. van Schaik and Iwao Kazushi identified two pieces from
the narrative among the Tibetan manuscripts found in Dunhuang/Shazhou, for
which see their "Two Fragments of the Testament of Ba from Dunhuang," Journal
of the American Oriental Society 128 (2009), 477-87. Given that the cave in which
these and other manuscripts were found was most probably sealed in circa 1006
— see Rong Xinjiang, "The Nature of the Dunhuang Library Cave and the Reasons
for its Sealing [tr. V. Hansen]," Cahiers d'Extrême Asie 11 (1999), 272 —, these
fragments predate all the other versions of this work. For more recent publications
of and anent Dba' bzhed-Sba bzhed-Rba bzhed texts, see my "A Hitherto Unknown
Tibetan Religious Chronicle From the Early Fourteenth Century," which
is in press in Zangxue xuekan / Journal of Tibetan Studies 7 (2011) and my "Notes
on the Diffusion of the Translations of the Large Prajñāpāramitāsūtra (Yum rgyas
pa) in Early Tibet," which is under preparation.
DPA', 293, 303. This means that he passed away in 741, the lcags sbrul year, or in
742, the chu rta year. Needless to say, many of the dates the Tibetan historians
have given for the Tibetan emperors are not reliable, and I refer to Sørenson
(1994) for the relevant remarks and summaries of earlier work.
Dalai Lama V, Bod kyi deb ther dpyid kyi rgyal mo'i glu dbyangs, 53: mkhas pa chen po
bu ston zhabs kyi gsung phal cher tshad mar gda' bas / rgyal po sa rta la 'khrungs par
gsungs pa 'di yig mkhan gyis nor ba'i rgyun 'byams pa zhig yin nam / [= Ahmed, tr.,
A History of Tibet by Ngag dbang blo bzang rgya mtsho Fifth Dalai Lama of Tibet, 51].