Dr. Markus Viehbeck (University of Vienna)Endangered Manuscripts at Drakmar Monastery, DolpoThe Documentation of an Alternative Model of the Tibetan Buddhist Canon

29 November 2023

16:00, 29 November 2023. ESA-Ost, Raum 120 & Zoom

In the past couple of years, several collections of canonical manuscripts in the remote Himalayan borderlands of Dolpo and Mustang have been documented and digitised under the aegis of the Tibetan Manuscript Project Vienna (TMPV). By focussing on Drakmar Monastery in the Tarap Valley of Lower Dolpo, this talk will illustrate the problems and prospects of such documentation activities. It will further discuss the typical structures of manuscript holdings in that region, in particular the Sūtra collections that feature as common building blocks for such larger corpora of canonical literature. As will be argued, these Sūtra collections, which survived in this region also due to the sustained human engagement with manuscripts, must be seen as an alternative model to the mainstream canon.

The lecture will be held at ESA-Ost, Raum 120, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, 20146 Hamburg, and via Zoom. For those who wish to participate via Zoom and are not students/members of Universität Hamburg, please write a short email to Prof. Dr. Wangchuk one day before the event: dorji.wangchuk@uni-hamburg.de.

Click to download the invitation as a PDF

Prof. Dr. Dorji Wangchuk (Director)
Khyentse Center for Tibetan Buddhist Textual Scholarship (KC-TBTS)
Abteilung für Kultur und Geschichte Indiens und Tibets
Asien-Afrika-Institut
Universität Hamburg
Alsterterrasse 1
D-20354 Hamburg