While preparing for my summer semester palaeography course, I glanced through an unpublished manuscript in Tibetan ume (dbu med) handwriting that briefly presents the history of the Sakya (Sa skya) tradition of the Lamdre (Lam ’bras) in Tibet by recounting the lives of its successive lineage masters, entitled The Tibetan History of the Excellent Lamas (Bla ma dam pa bod kyi lo rgyus, 10 fols.).
The text piqued my interest for two reasons, the first of which leads to the second, the main theme of this post. The first reason has to do with its place in the early accounts of outlining the history of the Lamdre transmission in Tibet. Without going here into many details, which also await some further clarification, the text appears to have been written by Tsokgom Rinpoche Künga Pel (Tshogs sgom Rin po che Kun dga’ dpal, fl. 13th century), a disciple of Sakya Paṇḍita Künga Gyeltsen (Sa skya Paṇḍita Kun dga’ rgyal mtshan, 1182–1251).
Tsokgom Rinpoche presents the lives of the following Tibetan masters: Drokmi Lotsāwa Shākya Yeshe (’Brog mi Lo tsā ba Shākya ye shes, 993–1077?) and his disciples, including Setön Künrik (Se ston Kun rig, 1025–1122); the disciples of Setön Künrik such as Zhangtön Chöbar (Zhang ston Chos ’bar, 1053–1135) alias Zhang Gönpawa (Zhang dGon pa ba), and Sachen Künga Nyingpo (Sa chen Kun dga’ snying po, 1092–1158). At the end, Tsokgom Rinpoche adds some very brief remarks on Loppön Sönam Tsemo (Slob dpon bSod nams rtse mo, 1142–1182), Jetsün Drakpa Gyeltsen (rJe btsun Grags pa rgyal mtshan, 1147–1214), and Sakya Paṇḍita.
Tsokgom Rinpoche’s history seems to lie between the first account of the Lamdre in Tibet, written by Jetsün Drakpa Gyeltsen and entitled The Tibetan History of the Lineage Lamas (Bla ma brgyud pa bod kyi lo rgyus), and the much more detailed history by Martön Chökyi Gyelpo (dMar ston Chos kyi rgyal po, c. 1198–c. 1259). The latter’s work is entitled The Tibetan History of the Excellent Masters (Bla ma dam pa bod kyi lo rgyus) and is also referred to in its colophon as The Live Stories of the Lamas, the Tibetan Transmission: The Incisive Vajra (Bla ma bod kyi brgyud pa’i rnam thar zhib mo rdo rje).
In his excellent study and translation of Martön’s work, Cyrus Stearns (2001: 69) explains that Martön
was one of the chief disciples of Sa skya Paṇḍita, and his works were composed with the specific intention of recording Sa skya Paṇḍita’s own teachings of the Lam ’bras. Dmar ston’s writings are especially significant because Sa skya Paṇḍita himself wrote no major works on the Lam ’bras and only a handful of brief texts concerning its practice.
Stearns (2001: 73–74) goes on to clarify that
his text is just the basic thread of the narrative, which he would have greatly expanded upon orally when he actually taught the Lam ’bras to small groups of disciples. Grags pa rgyal mtshan’s main disciple was his nephew Sa skya Paṇḍita. Since it is known that Grags pa rgyal mtshan taught the Lam ’bras many times, Sa skya Paṇḍita certainly heard the teachings from him on more than one occasion, and learned from his uncle stories about his grandfather and the earlier masters of the lineage. Sa skya Paṇḍita became a repository of the lore that had been passed down in his family and which he drew on when he later taught the Lam ’bras himself. There can be no doubt about where the detailed information in Dmar ston’s record of Sa skya Paṇḍita’s teachings came from—it came from Grags pa rgyal mtshan, who had received it from his father and brother, and later from Sa chen’s elder disciples.
One of the textual witnesses of Martön’s history studied by Stearns contains a large number of annotations that “record Tshogs sgom Rin po che’s further oral expansions of Sa skya Paṇḍita’s stories when using Dmar ston’s text during his own teaching of the Lam ’bras” (Stearns 2001: 77), and are thus “a further record of Sa skya Paṇḍita’s own teachings about the lives of the early masters of the Lam ’bras” (Stearns 2001: 78). And “this additional material was added to the text by one of Tshogs sgom’s disciples, most likely gNyag sNying po rgyal mtshan” (Stearns 2001: 78).
In the future, a detailed study of Tsokgom Rinpoche’s manuscript of The Tibetan History of the Excellent Lamas (Bla ma dam pa bod kyi lo rgyus) in comparison with Martön’s history and its annotations, which are also said to be records of Tsokgom Rinpoche’s teachings, will hopefully help to better understand the relationship between these texts.
After this somewhat lengthy introduction to provide more context for the manuscript under discussion, the second and my main point of interest is the markers used in it to connect annotations to specific points in the text, which are used in addition to the usual lines of small dots. Put simply, these markers work in much the same way as the markers for endnotes or footnotes in academic writing, which usually consist of a small superscript number or a symbol that corresponds to the same marker where the endnote or footnote is located. These markers seem to have been used whenever the annotation would have been too long to add in direct vicinity of the annotated passage and thus was placed either above the first line or below the last line on a folio. Moreover, they were also used to connect and thus continue annotations at other points on the folio when the annotations became too long to complete at the point where they were initially begun.
Given the different shapes of the markers, the question arises as to whether there was a system behind their use, and whether the markers were common knowledge among scribes, or whether scribes invented them whenever they needed to add a certain number of annotations to a folio. I am also unaware of any names these individual markers may have had, let alone being able to identify what they symbolise. However, a general term for this phenomenon of markers might be chentak (mchan rtags) in Tibetan, “annotation markers,” as kindly suggested to me by Cyrus Stearns.
Examples of Markers Connecting Annotations
Here are some examples of common markers used in the manuscript to link annotations.
Marker Type 1
Figs. 1–6 show the most commonly used marker. The figures are shown in pairs, that is, the first shows the marker as it is used below or after the main body of the text to mark the place where the annotation connects, and the second shows the marker as it is used to mark the beginning of the corresponding annotation. I have also seen this particular marker in other manuscripts.
Figs. 1–2
Figs. 3–4
Figs. 5–6
Marker Type 2
Figs. 7–14 show four pairs of another marker. Possibly by oversight, the scribe also added a second marker for Fig. 8, which is the same as introduced in the previous category.
Figs. 7–8
Figs. 9–10
Figs. 11–12
Figs. 13–14
Marker Type 3
Figs. 15–18 show two pairs of examples of another marker.
Figs. 15–16
Figs. 17–18
Marker Type 4
Figs. 19–20 are another pair of yet another marker.
Examples of Markers Continuing Annotations
The marker introduced above as type 1 is also used to join two parts of an annotation that had to be split because there was not enough space to complete the annotation where it had begun and had to be continued in another free space on the folio. Figs. 21–22 show an example where the annotation was written across the entire first line of the folio and then continued below the last line.
Figs. 21–22
Figs. 23–24 and Figs. 25–26 are examples of a second type of marker used for continuing annotations.
Figs. 23–24
Figs. 25–26
Bibliography
Stearns, Cyrus. 2001. Luminous Lives: The Story of the Early Masters of the Lam ‘bras Tradition in Tibet. Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism. Boston: Wisdom Publications.
Tshogs sgom Rin po che Kun dga’ dpal (fl. 13th century). Bla ma dam pa bod kyi lo rgyus. dBu med manuscript, 10 fols.