treatise

A short treatise on the different kinds of rosaries (Skt.māla; Tib.'phreng ba) appropriate for practitioners of the different buddha families. A French translation can be found in. At the outset the author divides his discussion into seven topics, though he ends up addressing only four of them and appends an additional one. The seven topics listed initially include: (1) the teacher who activated it, (2) the tantra from which it is gathered, (3) the origin from which it arose, (4) the class to which it belongs, (5) the method for counting, taught correctly for each buddha-family, (6) the correct meditation, (7) what about(?) the signs from the meaning?

These topics are difficult to translate but can be understood by resorting to. The latter is a Khotanese text, discovered in the same Cave of the Thousand Buddhas, of which the present item appears to be an abridged version. A transcription and translation of the Khotanese can be found in292-296. The topics listed above roughly correspond to those found at1r.4-1v.1. Moreover, the additional topics and the dropped topics appear in the Khotanese and in a similar order. This is all made more interesting by the fact that a number of other Tibetan manuscripts in the Stein collection use the same style of dividing the discussion into topics and are in the same handwriting, and many of these other manuscripts have Khotanese page numbering. See, for example,IOL Tib J 338,IOL Tib J 340,IOL Tib J 423,IOL Tib J 424, andIOL Tib J 425. (Also note that all of these manuscripts come from the same bundle, namely Ch.73.III.) The Khotanese numbering on these manuscripts suggests that the scribe may have been Khotanese, which may in turn explain the similarity between the present item and the Khotanese rosary text.

In comparing the two items, several differences emerge. The present Tibetan text ascribes the teaching on rosaries to the well known Indian scholarVimalamitra, whereas the Khotanese text ascribes it to oneBaśrīmajsuwhom Stein suggests may be identical withrBa(orDba',Sba)Mañju. He also classifies the teaching asMahāyogaand says it was gathered from a tantra bearing the title,Thub pa a ba da ra. This title remains unidentified, but it also appears in84920(see too7). Finally, Stein claims that, "the Khotanese text is without doubt based on a Tibetan model" (269). Unfortunately, he gives no reasons for this conclusion.

References

notes

Mantra, apparently for blessing the squeezed dough offering (chang bu).