Some Remarks on the Textual Transmission and Text of Bu ston

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pens and paper that were in use or the different styles in which a
book could and did make its physical appearance are subjects that
still remain to be explored to any degree of detail, not to mention
where paper and writing instruments were actually manufactured,
when not imported. The recent work by Dpal bsdus is indeed a good
beginning. 14 In his youthful 1624 commentary on Sa skya Paṇḍita's
unprecedented Rol mo'i bstan bcos, Treatise of the Musical Arts, Sa skya
monastery's twenty-eighth grand-abbot A mes zhabs Ngag dbang
kun dga' bsod nams (1597-1659) mentions an old manuscript of his
precursor's work which, he stipulates, was written with an "iron pen"
(lcags smyug) on golden-hued paper (shog bu gser mdangs can ma). 15
And he estimates that this manuscript dates from the time when Sa
skya Paṇḍita was alive and well, that is, from the first half of the thirteenth
century. This is a not insignificant datum.
A similar kind of ignorance confronts us when we open a Tibetan
book. The varieties of punctuation and punctuation graphs that we
find used in them, the different ways in which the written text is spatially
organized on the piece of paper that has now morphed into a
book page, and even the different ways in which the colophons organize
such relevant bits of information as the identity of the author,
the place and time of his or her composition, the person or persons at
whose behest a work was written, and the ways in which the identity
of the scribe is given, all these items still need to be looked into and
accounted for in a systematic and sustained way. 16 And we can go on
and on. A work like the one M.T. Clanchy wrote for writing, penmanship,
and early England's book culture and production or, more
close to the Tibetan cultural area, even something more limited in
scale like O. von Hinüber's booklet on Indian Schriftlichkeit, are im-
14
15
16
Bod kyi yi ge'i rnam bshad seng ge'i nga ro (Chengdu: Si khron mi rigs dpe skrun
khang, 2004).
Rig pa'i gnas lnga las bzo rig pa'i bye brag rol mo'i bstan bcos kyi rnam par bshad pa
'jam dbyangs bla ma dges pa'i snyan pa'i sgra dbyangs blo gsal yid phrog 'phrin las
yongs khyab, Collected Works, vol. 6 (Kathmandu: Sa skya rgyal yongs gsung rab
slob gnyer khang, 2000), 534.
But see J.I. Cabezón, "Authorship and Literary Production in Classical Buddhist
Tibet," Changing Minds. Contributions to the Study of Buddhism and Tibet in Honor of
Jeffrey Hopkins, ed. G. Newland (Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications, 2001), 233-63, M.
Clemente, "Colophons as Sources: Historical Information from <strong>Some</strong> Brag dkar
rta so Xylographies," Rivista di Studi Sudasiatici 11 (2007), 121-58, and O. Almogi,
"How Authentic are Titles and Colophons in Tantric Works in the Tibetan Canon?
The Case of Three Works and Their Authors and Translators," ed. O. Almogi,
Beiträge zur Zentralasienforschung, Bd. 24 (Halle: International Institute for
Tibetan and Buddhist Studies GmbH, 2008), 87-126, and their references to the
secondary literature.