Bon and Naxi Manuscripts

Charles Ramble, Agnieszka Helman-Ważny

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9783110776089
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110776478
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The present volume offers a dozen studies of manuscripts of the Tibetan Bon and Naxi Dongba traditions across time and space. While some of the contributions focus on particular features of manuscripts from either tradition, others explicitly bridge the two by considering common codicological and material aspects of selected examples or common themes in the content of the texts. This is the first primarily object-based study to deal with the cultural history and technology of books from the two traditions. It discusses collections of Bon and Naxi manuscripts, the concepts and history of both traditions, the science and technology of book studies as it relates to these collections, the relationship between text and image, writing materials, and the historical and archaeological context of the manuscripts' places of origin. The authors are specialists in different fields including philology, anthropology, art history, codicology and archaeometry. The contributions shed light on trade routes, materials and technologies as well as on reading practices and ritual usage of Bon and Naxi manuscripts.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• A Tibetan Book of Spells
• Magical Recipes from the Grimoire of a Tibetan Bonpo Priest
• Notes on a Bonpo Manual for the Production of Manuscript Amulets
• Earth and Wind, Water and Fire: Book Binding and Preservation in pre-Mongol Bon Ritual Manuals for Consecrations
• Preliminary Remarks on the Drangsong Collection of Bon Manuscripts in Mustang, Nepal
• Preliminary Remarks on Bonpo Manuscripts in Dolpo
• Towards a Definition of Local Orthographies of Bon Manuscripts: A Pilot Study
• An Old Tibetan Myth on Retribution for Killing the Nyen (Gnyan stong): Manuscripts Scattered between Naxi, Tanguts, Eastern and Western Tibet
• A Newly-Discovered Manuscript of the Bonpo Klu ’bum and its Canonical Transformation
• The Lungyig Texts of the Leu Scriptures from the Phenchu Area, in Amdo
• Lost in Translation? A Brief History of the Study of Dongba Manuscripts from its Beginnings to 1945
• A ‘Key’ to the Dongba Script? A Re-Appraisal of a Set of Four Dongba Manuscripts, Held by the John Rylands Library
• Paper in Dongba Manuscripts from the Weltmuseum in Vienna
• Indexes