Some Remarks on the Textual Transmission and Text of Bu ston

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Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines
that its construction was finished in the chu [mo] yos year, that is, in
763. But writing about a hundred years after Dalai Lama V, Rig 'dzin
Tshe dbang nor bu pointed out that "a supreme scholar like Bu
[ston]" (mkhas mchog bu lta bu) could hardly be faulted for this. The
mistake in the "year's element[-designation] (lo khams)" was simply
an error on the part of a careless scribe. 66 But we may as well face it.
It cannot be denied that the Chos 'byung is extraordinarily weak
when it comes to providing dates for events and Bu ston's discussion
of the year in which the Buddha passed away is the only other place
in his entire œuvre, where, although he really remains uncommitted,
we witness him making an attempt to achieve some sort of chronological
precision. 67 But even there, in the final analysis and when all
is said and done, he leaves us with a sense of incompleteness and,
perhaps, even with a sense of intellectual disappointment. Then
again, maybe we should not feel this way. For it is quite possible
that, unlike many other Tibetan experts in the computational astronomy
of the Kālacakratantra corpus, Bu ston realized that the data
provided by this corpus were unable to provide such calculations for
events that happened long ago, especially when the relevant sources
only gave the barest chronological details about their occurrences. It
is thus perhaps not surprising that not one Indic scholar who wrote
about the Kālacakra's computational astronomy — I am here thinking
in particular of the two luminaries Abhayākaragupa (ca. 1065-1125)
and Śā kyaśrībhadra — ever ventured to calculate the important
dates of the Buddha's life, let alone the year of his nirvāṇa-passing,
by resorting to this corpus. Earlier, in his 1319 commentary on
Haribhadra's (ca. 800) Abhisamayālaṃkāravivṛtti, Bu ston had taken
the established Sa skya pa position, namely that the historical Buddha
had passed to nirvāṇa in 2133 B.C., as his own point of view.
Thus, he stated that three thousand four hundred and fifty years had
elapsed since the year of his writing, namely, the earth-female-sheep
year, 1319. 68 The other place where he attempts to put forward a
more sophisticated chronology is in the section on the "correct year"
(lo dag, śuddhavarśa) of the Kālacakratantra corpus in the fifth chapter
66
67
68
TSHE, 547; TSHE1, 198.
This passage was studied in C. Vogel, "Bu-ston on the Date of the Buddha's Nirvana,"
The Dating of the Historical Buddha / Die Datierung des historischen Buddha,
Part 1, ed. H. Bechert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 403-14.
Shes rab kyi pha rol tu phyin pa'i man ngag gi bstan bcos mngon par rtogs pa'i rgyan
ces bya ba'i 'grel pa'i rgya cher bshad pa lung gi snye ma, The Collected Works of Bu
ston [and Sgra tshad pa], Lhasa Zhol print, part 18 (New Delhi: International
Academy of Indian Culture, 1971), 725.