Under the sway of the dominant “waste” theories on the nature of Dunhuang manuscripts, we tend to default to the conclusion that IOL Tib J 3 and 218 contain independent Chinese and Tibetan texts joined in the process of recycling discarded manuscripts. However, this paper demonstrates that the texts from these two manuscripts constitute coherent Vinaya compositions. The three layers of the handwriting of these two manuscripts were not written randomly, but exhibit clear-cut functions: while the larger Tibetan script, which was produced in a previous project, was used to write Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya commentaries, the smaller Tibetan script and the Chinese script were created as parts of the same bilingual project to provide different textual sources on the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya texts. The Chinese and the Tibetan text in the smaller script, proceeding from the high-level bilingualism of Dunhuang Buddhist communities, display a robust thematic affinity in many cases.
In this paper, I focus on the palaeography of a collection of eight Tibetan manuscripts hypothesised to have been written by the same scribal hand. The eight manuscripts—IOL Tib J 217, IOL Tib J 686, IOL Tib J 687, IOL Tib J 625, IOL Tib J 588, IOL Tib J 619, P. T. 770, and P. T. 783v—are closely related, not merely in light of their sophisticated cursive handwriting, but also by virtue of their common textual genre (being summaries or commentaries rather than direct scriptural translations) and thematic content: these Tibetan texts were all based on Chinese sources and attributed to Gö Chödrup (fl. first half of the 9th c., Tib. ’Gos Chos grub, Chin. Wu Facheng 吳法成), either directly or indirectly. Moreover, many manuscripts produced by the imperial Tibetan copying project contain editorial records written in the same hand; these records indicate that Chödrup acted as the final proofreader. Therefore, we can now more confidently attribute this hand to Chödrup himself. By establishing a typology of this handwriting and offering a table of how syllables are written by this hand in the appendix, this paper contributes to a better reading of manuscripts containing this type of script and can potentially provide a benchmark for further recognition of works written in the same hand.
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