Old Tibetan Documents Online

Old Tibetan Documents Online (OTDO) is a corpus of selected Old Tibetan texts (VIIth to XIIth centuries): Dunhuang manuscripts, Inscriptions and related materials. We provide critically edited texts together with search and KeyWord In Context (KWIC) facilities.

→ Old Tibetan Documents Online བོད་ཡིག

Introduction

The social and cultural history of the Tibetan Empire (c.600 – c.850), Tibetan activities in Central Asia, and the development of Buddhist and non-Buddhist religious traditions are some of the main topics elucidated by Old Tibetan documents. These documents constitute a large corpus of Tibetan writing dating from the VIIth to XIIth centuries. Included in this corpus are inscriptions from all over the Tibetan plateau, paper documents from Dunhuang, and wooden and paper documents from Tibetan imperial outposts in Central Asia such as Mīrān and Mazār Tāgh.

In order to make these documents widely and freely available, the editors have transliterated selected texts and published these on the OTDO website. For each transliteration, the text has been closely read by at least two pairs of eyes, either by our editors who have consulted the documents in person, or with recourse to high-quality images. The editors have favored famous texts such as the Old Tibetan Annals and the Old Tibetan Chronicle, and the selections also mirror the principal areas of research into Old Tibetan documents: divination, law, letters, contracts, and religious texts of both Buddhist and non-Buddhist varieties. This corpus is expanding, and we aim to increase both our depth and breadth of coverage.

Each individual text can be searched using the KeyWord In Context (KWIC) search engine. One can also use the search to find a given term or terms in context by searching the entire corpus. This makes it a crucial tool for lexical, linguistic, and textual research, and an excellent resource for determining the meanings of words not found in dictionaries.

In addition to our website, OTDO also publishes a monograph series in cooperation with the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA). It is our hope that OTDO will continue to grow and contribute to lexical,linguistic, and textual research, both through the website and through the OTDO monograph series.

History

The importance of Tibetan documents from Dunhuang has long been recognised by European scholars since they were discovered and brought to London and Paris by Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943) and Paul Pelliot (1878-1945) respectively at the beginning of the twentieth century. However preliminary painstaking and unrewarding work was necessary for them to be fully and systematically used by scholars. In the first volume of her Inventaire (1939, avertissement, p. v), Marcelle Lalou (1890-1967) who carried out this task for the entire Pelliot collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France writes as follows:

``The manuscripts were brought back just as they were found, in a disorderly state and, more often than not, covered with indescribable filth. When you unpacked a bundle, you discovered a jumble of miscellaneous pieces which, according to your state of mind, you found either repulsive or exciting: disparate pages of every size without any sequential order -- often lacking page numbers or letters indicating which volume they belonged to -- that were ripped and soiled with mud, butter and bird droppings, huge worn-out and wrinkled scrolls, the edges eaten by rodents or chewed-up by ruminants, all in a more or less fragile state, and still smelly after so many years. ... But a patient reader will find these materials as documents of rare value for history, philology, paleography and even for art. One can not overestimate their importance, neither limit the fields of research which would be enriched, if not renewed sometimes, by their study.''

Her perspicacious assessment of the importance of these manuscripts from Dunhuang was to prove perfectly correct. The single most eloquent and unequivocal demonstration of their importance for the study of ancient Tibet is without any doubt Documents de Touen-houang relatifs à l'histoire du Tibet by J. Bacot (1877-1965), C.G. Toussint (-1938) and F.W. Thomas (1867-1956), Paris, 1940 (published only in 1946 after the Second World War). In this monograph, two texts namely the Old Tibetan Chronicle and Old Tibetan Annals, undisputedly the two most important historical documents discovered at Dunhuang, were transliterated and translated for the first time.

Professor Hisashi Satō, author of Kodai chibetto-shi kenkyū 古代チベット史研究 (A Study on the Ancient History of Tibet) (Kyoto, 1958/59; reprinted in 1977), recalls (personal communication) that it was this publication that enabled him to establish a firm chronology of ancient Tibet, a work which would have been impossible by the use of Chinese materials and later Tibetan texts alone.

For the study of Tibetan civilisation as a whole, R.A. Stein (1911-1999) puts the importance of the Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang in the following terms:

``The Tibetan documents from Dunhuang allowed us for the first time to truly reveal the beginning of Tibetan civilisation which remained until then in a dense mist.'' (Choix, tome I, 1978, preface, p. 5).

However, for many years access to these materials of exceptional value was jealously reserved for the small number of scholars who lived in England or France, or to those exceptionally privileged scholars who could travel to London or Paris. Thanks to an increasing number of publications, monographs and articles, which occasionally had integral or partial facsimile reproductions of the manuscripts, Tibetan documents from Dunhuang became gradually more easily accessible to a greater number of scholars, and their study progressed considerably. Since the 1960s, microfilms have been acquired by a small number of research institutions and libraries outside of England and France. To give just one example, the Toyo Bunko (Oriental Library), Tokyo, became the depository for the microfilm of the Stein Dunhuang collection, both Chinese and Tibetan, kept at the India Office Library and Records (now merged into the British Library) and contributed enormously to the development of ``Tonkō-gaku (Dunhuang Studies)'' in Japan.

In this respect, the Bibliothèque nationale de France played an important role by publishing in 1978/79 the two volume of Choix de documents tibétains conservés à la Bibliothèque nationale de France et complété par quelques manuscrits à l'India Office Library in which a total of 168 of the most important and representative Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang (162 from the Pelliot collection and 6 from the Stein collection) were reproduced in facsimile on 640 high quality large (A4) size plates. The 500 copies of this reproduction in facsimile contributed significantly to make Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang accessible to a wider circle of academic research.

The new publication entitled Fazang Dunhuang zangwen wenxian 法蔵敦煌蔵文文献 / Tibetan Documents from Dunhuang in the Bibliothèque nationale de France published by Shanghai guji chubanshe上海古籍出版社 which began in 2006 in China (to be completed in ca. 20 volumes) is an epoque-making project. It projects a large size high quality facsimile reproduction of the entire Pelliot Tibetan collection and will be followed by another series which will cover the entire Stein Tibetan collection kept at the British Library. With the completion of these publications, the two most important collections of Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang will be accessible to the public for the first time.

Another important project which is almost completed is the digitalisation in colour of all Tibetan documents from Dunhuang kept in London and Paris. In the near future, it will therefore be possible to consult each and every manuscript on the websites of the British Library (a certain number of manuscripts are already on the website of the International Dunhuang Project)¥footnote{¥tt http://idp.bl.uk/} and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. With this new ease of access to the entire Stein and Pelliot collections of Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang, the study of these manuscripts will enter a radically different new age.

Once this mass of still unexplored materials are easily accessible, the various difficulties peculiar to them, which pioneer scholars have for a century been endeavouring to solve with differing degrees of success, will be fully realised.

First of all, the deciphering of their writing itself is far from being an easy task. In fact, the handwriting of Dunhuang manuscripts has peculiar paleographical features, and is sometimes ``diabolical'' to use the term employed by Marcelle Lalou (cf. fig. 2 below). The writing style varies from one scribe to another, and even within a single manuscript the style sometimes changes form one passage to another. It is common for the consonant letters nga, ta, da and ra not to be always clearly differentiated and they are often almost impossible to distinguish. Likewise ligatures such as sda and rda look almost alike. In such cases, the context and comparison with parallel passages are the only ways to establish a correct reading. Unfortunately this is not always possible. As the majority of Dunhuang manuscripts are fragmentary, incomplete and unique, it is rather rare that one finds parallel passages in several manuscripts. Further one encounters among the Dunhuang manuscripts numerous syllables and words which are not found in the classical literature and the dictionaries which are known to us. The terminology used in Dunhuang manuscripts is so different from that of classical Tibetan, that even contemporary Tibetan scholars are often of no help in this field. As a result, one is more than often not sure of how to decipher an unknown syllable or word, and in such cases one has no clue to guess its meaning. One is left desperately alone and helpless.

As a pioneer, Marcelle Lalou, who catalogued the entire Pelliot Tibetan manuscript collection, knew this difficult situation better than anyone else. In order to tackle and overcome it, she accumulated, in the course of many years' meticulous cataloguing work, two sets of neatly handwritten files which were certainly her most reliable work tool (They are now deposited at the Société Asiatique of Paris).

The first one consists of transliterations (some partial, but the majority integral) of 167 manuscripts (cf. Imaeda 1998b, p. 78). The facsimile reproductions of a passage of an original manuscript and of its transliteration by Marcelle Lalou show well the difficulty of transliteration and how meticulous Marcelle Lalou was in her work.

As Marcelle Lalou notes, the handwriting of this manuscript is ``diabolical'' and a ``formidable devoicing'' is noticed: the voiced consonant da is completely devoiced and no differentiation is made between da and its devoiced equivalent ta. This manuscript is a fine example of the type of difficulties that one faces in dealing with documents from Dunhuang. Therefore, the transliteration by Marcelle Lalou who had unparalleled experience with them is most precious.

The transliterations by Marcelle Lalou are priceless for a completely different reason. Notwithstanding the preservation measures taken by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the British Library (initially the British Museum and the India Office Library and Records), certain manuscripts are slowly deteriorating. Pelliot tibétain 1047 is a typical example of this process. This manuscript was integrally reproduced in Choix, tome II with lines numbered 1 through 403. As shown in fig. 3 below, in pl. 335, line 108 ends in the middle with the syllable ngo followed by a shad. After a blank space equivalent to two lines, line 109 starts after a blank equivalent to four or five syllables.

When the manuscript was photographed in the 1960s, nothing was legible in the blank space between the end of the line 108 and the beginning of the line 109. However in this apparent blank space void of writing, there is in Lalou's transliteration a full sentence written in vermillion ink starting with mo 'di and ending with mi lta'o. This means that when Marcelle Lalou examined the manuscript sometime prior to the1960s, this passage written in vermillion ink was still legible. No photographic record of this passage exists and the transliteration by Marcelle Lalou is its only testimony. We have restituted in the present edition this passage now effaced without any trace (the right half of line 108, full two lines 109 and 110, and the beginning of line 111 which was wrongly numbered 109 in Choix, pl. 335). This is just one example, there are other cases where effaced passages have been restored from the transliteration made by Marcelle Lalou. This amply shows the importance of Macelle Lalou's file of transliterations.

The other set of materials that Marcelle Lalou has left is a file of over a thousand cards of rare syllables and words arranged in Tibetan alphabetical order. For each syllable or word, Lalou transliterates it together with several preceding and following syllables which provide the context in which it appears. In certain cases, Lalou notes personal observations, references to other studies, definitions given in classical Tibetan dictionaries, a tentative definition of the meaning, etc. as shown in the illustration below:

It is in reference to these cards that R.A. Stein wrote in the preface to Choix (I, p. 7) as follows:

``M. Lalou has accumulated in the course of her reading a voluminous file of rare words, quoting for each word the entire phrase which might be useful to define it. We have a project to publish this vocabulary. However the work will still require much time, because one has to check the reading and the reference of the manuscripts. We also have the intention to complement this vocabulary by notes and remarks that other scholars have made.''

As the importance of this vocabulary was evident, it was decided to publish it after the facsimile reproductions of manuscripts Choix I and II. The preparation of this material was entrusted to me in the beginning of 1970s and I typed the cards in four copies which were intended for R.A. Stein, Mme A. Macdonald, Mme A.M. Blondeau and myself for further references, comments and observations. However, for technical and financial reasons, this project never materialized. While typing them one by one, I fully realised the importance of these cards and was convinced that they would be of tremendous help for any researcher who studies Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang. At the same time, I was fully aware that numerous and precious as they were, Lalou's cards were not exhaustive listings of rare, unknown or obscure syllables and words among the Dunhuang materials. Marcelle Lalou certainly never intended to make such a listing. Although they are useful and precious as they are, they leave much to be desired as a reference work.

For several years after the project was finally abandoned, I could not help feeling pity for the cards not being made public on the one hand, and on the other hand I continued exploring the possibilities of having a more reliable and exhaustive reference work created. It was during this period that I had the chance of participating in the Tibetan computerization project at Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS) which was started in the first years of 1970s at the initiative of Prof. Hajime Kitamura (1923-2003). In the1980s, this Tibetan character-based computing system became fully operational with sort facility in Tibetan alphabetical order. To my knowledge, this is one of the first, if not the very first, systems of its kind in the world. Therefore I decided to make use of it for establishing, in collaboration with my colleague Tsuguhito Takeuchi (Kobe City University of Foreign Studies), a critical edition in Tibetan characters of the eleven most important and representative historical documents reproduced in Choix I and II, and for providing an exhaustive KWIC (Key Words In Context) concordance of all the syllables appearing in the texts. The result was published in 1990 by the Bibliothèque nationale de France in the form of printed book entitled Corpus syllabique, volume III of the Choix de documents tibétains series. The utility of this type of work being widely recognized, with the participation of three younger colleagues namely Izumi Hoshi (ILCAA), Yoshimichi Ohara (Okayama University) and Iwao Ishikawa (The Eastern Institute), another 13 texts were subsequently input and Corpus syllabique, volume IV was published in 2001 by the ILCAA in the same format as volume III.

All the participants were fully convinced of the necessity of enlarging the corpus. Therefore, the Old Tibetan Documents Online (OTDO) was formed at the ILCAA with Izumi Hoshi as coordinator and the work continued with two additional members namely Kazushi Iwao (Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) and Ai Nishida (Kobe City University of Foreign Studies), both promising students of Tsuguhito Takeuchi. At this stage, through the Grammatological Informatics based on Corpora of Asian Scripts (GICAS) of the ILCAA of which the OTDO became an integral part, was received substantial financial aid from the Japanese Ministry of Research and Education. These funds enabled several members of the project to consult the original materials in Paris and London, which greatly facilitated the deciphering of manuscripts.

At the last stage, Brandon Dotson (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) who has been working on Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang independently from our project generously agreed to share with us his critical reading of a certain number of manuscripts.

Thus the number of manuscripts transliterated increased (at present 65 in total) and it became evident that further publication in the conventional printed book form had become impractical, if not impossible. Therefore it was decided to publish a cumulative edition of transliterated texts alone in the conventional printed book form, which has its own utility, and leave the KWIC concordance and other tools on the website of the OTDO. At the same time, in order to enable a more critical editing of the materials, it was decided to convert all the data from Tibetan characters into latin letters following the transliteration system designed specifically for the project (for details, cf. pp. XXXI). All the necessary software which resulted from this decision have been assured by Fumihiro Chiba (Tsuklakang Co. Ltd.) who has long experience in computing Tibetan materials. He also designed a new format for the KWIC concordance as shown in fig. 5 and 6, and added new enhanced facilities of search and sort. The present printed edition of texts in transliteration is the first by-product of this newly designed database. The readers of this edition are therefore advised to constantly refer to it for the latest version of the critical edition and for further information and facilities.

We are still far behind Marcelle Lalou who transliterated 167 manuscripts, but our KWIC concordance allows us to search exhaustively any syllable and word in all the 65 manuscripts hitherto input, a feature which is impossible with Marcelle Lalou's cards. It is hoped that more manuscripts will be deciphered and added to this database which offers the formidable facility of exhaustive search.

The Old Tibetan Documents Online (OTDO) is an ongoing database project which shall gradually and continuously expand. On the one hand, it will cover more materials of the Imperial and Post-Imperial period (VIIth-Xth centuries): manuscripts from Dunhuang and other Central Asian sites, inscriptions discovered in Tibet and adjacent areas, etc. On the other hand, search facilities like KWIC concordance will be improved and diversified, and various indices for personal names, place names, titles etc. will be made. Maintained and coordinated by the ILCAA, it will be an open forum to which suggestions and contributions from all are most welcome and solicited.

It was exactly 37 years ago in the last days of 1969 that I first laid hands upon several Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang in the reading room of the Département des manuscrits orientaux of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Richelieu. I was excited and fascinated by these over one thousand year old manuscripts but at the same time overwhelmed by their difficulties. With a new powerful tool like the Old Tibetan Documents Online database in hand, I am confident that we are better off for pursuing the decipherment of old Tibetan materials in order to have a better knowledge of ancient Tibetan civilisation.

	OTDO was conducted under the GICAS project sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology under its Grant-in-Aid for COE Research Program.
Grammatological Informatics based on Corpora of Asian Scripts

About Us

Staff

Coordinator	HOSHI Izumi	ILCAA, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
	IWAO Kazushi	Ryukoku University
	NISHIDA Ai	Kyoto University
Editor-in-Chief	TAKEUCHI Tsuguhito	Kobe City University of Foreign Studies
Editors	DONEY, Lewis	Ruhr-Universität Bochum
	DOTSON, Brandon	Georgetown University
	HILL, Nathan	The School of Oriental and African Studies, London
	IMAEDA Yoshiro	Kokoro Research Center, Kyoto University
	ISHIKAWA Iwao	The Eastern Institute, Tokyo
	OROSZ, Gergely	Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
	VAN SCHAIK, Sam	The British Library

Related Organizations

	Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA)
	Kobe City University of Foreign Studies
	Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) -- UMR8155
	The International Dunhuang Project (IDP)

Acknowledgements

	This project is supported by the Information Resources Center (IRC) of the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA)
	IRCプロジェクト "Old Tibetan Documents Online" 2013年度, 2017年度, 2018年度, 2019年度, 2020年度 (代表者: 岩尾一史, 星泉)

Site Policy

The materials published on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY).

Disclaimers

1. The content of this website may change without notice.
2. We are not responsible for any loss caused directly or indirectly by the use of the information in this website.

Contact

• mail address: otdo.office(at)gmail.com
• postal address : OTDO Office, ILCAA, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Fuchu-shi Asahi-cho 3-11-1, Tokyo, 183-8534, Japan

Revision History

• 2013: ウェブサイト移行(https://otdo.aa-ken.jpの試験運用)
• 2017: ウェブサイト移行(https://otdo.aa-ken.jpの本格始動)、共同編集用Wikiの統合
• 2018: 72件のテキストデータと関係データの追加
• 2019: 既存のテキスト50件の修正と新規テキスト10件の追加
• 2020: 既存のテキスト◯件の修正と新規テキスト14件の追加、チベット文字検索サイト構築

Publications

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Editorial Policy

Editing principles

In order to retain the peculiarities of the original documents such as archaic spellings, alternation between aspirated and unaspirated consonants, the use of ya btags, etc, the text is transliterated as it appears and is edited as lightly as possible with minimal annotations. As a consequence, liaisons like phyogsu (for phyogs su) and alternation between aspirated and unaspirated consonants are left untouched without emendation.

However, in order to facilitate the reading of the transliterated text, the following measures have been taken by deliberate editorial decision:

1. A syllable is often divided into two parts, the first part being written at the end of a line and the second one at the beginning of the following line. In such cases, the two parts are merged together to reconstitute the original syllable and its line number is that of the line in which the radical letter of the syllable is written. For example, when sang is written at the end of line x, and the letter sa alone at the beginning of the following line (x+1), the syllable sangs is restituted at the line x.
2. Very often the last letter of a syllable is written below the preceeding letter (for economy of space), like དྔ་ for དང་ , and བཀཱ་ for བཀའ་ . In such cases, dang and bka' are restituted without mention of this peculiar paleographical feature.
3. Certain lines are indented in oder to clearly indicate :
   • verses in six or seven syllables,
   • casts of dice in divination texts, and
   • evident internal divisions which however are not marked by any punctuation signs.

Full critical editing and notes can be found on the website of Old Tibetan Documents Online (OTDO), where search facilities, such as a KWIC concordance tool, are also available. Furtheremore, as updating, revision, and enlargement will continually and regularly be done on the website, readers are advised to refer to it for the latest version.

Transliteration system

The transliteration system of Tibetan followed in this edition is based on the Wylie system, but some changes and additions have been made in order to faithfully transliterate certain features which are peculiar to Old Tibetan manuscripts.

Consonants

ཀ་	ka	ཁ་	kha	ག་	ga	ང་	nga
ཅ་	ca	ཆ་	cha	ཇ་	ja	ཉ་	nya
ཏ་	ta	ཐ་	tha	ད་	da	ན་	na
པ་	pa	ཕ་	pha	བ་	ba	མ་	ma
ཙ་	tsa	ཚ་	tsha	ཛ་	dza	ཝ་	wa
ཞ་	zha	ཟ་	za	འ་	'a	ཡ་	ya
ར་	ra	ལ་	la	ཤ་	sha	ས་	sa
ཧ་	ha	ཨ་	^a

Vowels

　ཨ་ ^a 　ཨི་ ^i 　ཨྀ་ ^I 　ཨུ་ ^u 　ཨེ་ ^e 　ཨོ་ ^o
　ཨཻ་ ^ai 　ཨཽ་ ^au 　ཨོེ་ ^oe

Notes

• The letter ཨ is transliterated as ^a with ^ as consonantal element.
• The reversed gi-gu is transliterated with I (capital letter).
  　གྀ་ gI 　ནྀ་ nI
• When the radical ya is prefixed with ga, the combination is transliterated as g.ya.
  　གཡག་ g.yag ~ (cf. 　གྱག་ gyag) 　གཡུང་ g.yung ~ (cf. 　གྱུང་ gyung)
• The wa-zur is transliterated with v, not with w.
  　གྲྭ་ grva 　ཕྱྭ་ phyva
• When the letter འ་ is written beneath a consonant, it is considered as gtags-yig, not as a long vowel sign.
  　ཨཱ་ ^'a ~ (not â) 　ཧཱུ་ h'u ~ (not hû) 　སཱོ་ s'o
• When two consonants form a vertical ligature which is not legal in classical Tibetan grammar, the + sign is inserted between them.
  　སྷོ་ s+ho ~ (cf. 　ཤོ་ sho) 　ཟྷ་ z+ha ~ (cf. 　ཞ་ zha)
• The anusvāra is transliterated with M (capital letter).
  　ཨོཾ་ ^oM 　ཨཱོཾ་ ^'oM
• A tsheg is, irrespective of its forms, transliterated with a space. Therefore it is not physically represented in the transliteration. Single and double tsheg are not differenciated.
• A shad is, irrespective of its forms, transliterated with /, repeated the number of times that it is written.
• A sign marking the beginning of a follio, paragaph, etc. is, irrespective of its forms, transliterated with $.
  　༄༅།ཿ།　 $ /:/
• The vertically placed two dots or circle (double tsheg) and four circles between two shad are transliterated with /:/ and /::/ respectively.
• A circle representing the eye on the face of a divination die is transcribed with @.

Signes critiques

rgya[s]

Supplements; s is illegible or disappeared, but supplied by the editor.

rgya[l?]

Doubtful readings.

[nus (/dus)]

Ambiguous readings.

[*rgyas]

Additions; letters omitted in the sources, but added by the editor.

[---]

Illegible letters; number unknown.

nu[-]

An illegible letter or letters in one syllable.

{rgyas}

Interpolations; letters found in the sources, but which are considered to be intrusions.

(abc)

Editor’s note.

(interline<) sangs rgyas (>interline)

Interlinear additions; sangs rgyas is written between two lines.

(inverted<) sangs rgyas (>inverted)

Inverted letters; sangs rgyas is written upside down with respect to the main text.

(seal<) phyag rgya (>seal)

Inscriptions; phyag rgya is inscribed in the seal.

(vermilion<) phyag rgya (>vermilion)

Vermilion letters; phyag rgya is written in vermilion ink.

Italic letters

Letters read by the previous study(ies) but not reconfirmed by the editors.

###

Blank spaces left by copyist.

Links

Related Organizations

• The International Dunhuang Project
• ILCAA, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
• Kobe City University of Foreign Studies
• Ryukoku University

Old Tibetan Manuscripts

• Bibliotheque nationale de France
• The International Dunhuang Project (IDP)

Tools

• Old Tibetan Dictionary