Great Perfection.pdf

CHAPTER TWO
THE ANCIENT DOCUMENTS ON RDZOGS CHEN
FROM TUN-HUANG
Among the Tun-huang Tibetan manuscripts of Sir Aurel Stein preserved
in the India Office Library in London, I was able in 1973 to discover
three works relevant to rDzogs chen. Two of them are texts which one
might call prototypes of the later literature of the rDzogs chen tradition.
The third one is merely a list of different successions of religious masters
including some of the rDzogs chen tradition in three different places in
Tibet in the eighth and ninth centuries A.D. I used these works as sources
for my lectures on rDzogs chen at the Sorbonne in 1973 and 74. 1 The
existence of these manuscripts has not previously been noted by any of
the Tibetologists writing on the rNying ma pa in general or on rDzogs
chen in particular. 2
Fortunately, unlike many of the Tun-huang manuscripts, these are complete
and sufficiently clear so that there is no difficulty in reading them.
In the catalogue of de la Vallée-Poussin, the manuscripts bear the following
numbers: 594, 647 and 689/2 respectively. 3
Tun-huang document No. I (IOL 647)
IOL 647 will be treated here at first since it contains one of the fundamental
texts of the rDzogs chen tradition. It consists of five folios in the ordinary
Tibetan format. Each of the folios has six lines from left to right
and the folios are paginated in the usual way from 1a to 5b. Folio 1b,
however, does not contain any part of the actual work, but a list of teachings
associated with prajñàpàramità. 4 It is scribed in an obviously different
hand from the rest of the manuscript. In spite of this textual interpolation,
the text is continuous from folio 1a to 2a judged in the light of the
grammatical structure and also from the point of view of the subject-
1 “Problèmes historiques et doctrinaux de la philosophie du rJogs-‘hen”, Annuaires E.P.H.E.
1973–74 (Tome 82), pp. 53–57. The third manuscript (IOL 689/2) was already published
by F.W. Thomas, Tibetan Literary Texts Concerning Chinese Turkestan, Part I (London 1935),
pp. 85–87.
2 E.g. Tucci, MBT II, pp. 102–54; 1973, pp. 117–25.
3 Louis de la Vallée-Poussin, Catalogue of the Tibetan manuscripts from Tun-huang in India Office
Library, London 1962.
4 See the Tun-huang documents reproduced at the end of this book.