Buddhism’s Early Spread to Tibet: Dunhuang and the Influence of Sinitic Scriptures

Introduction

Modern scholarship follows emic accounts in situating the origins of Tibetan Buddhism squarely in India, tacitly accepting Tibet’s claim to be heir to the orthodox tradition. This oversimplifies the complex history of Buddhism’s two transmissions to Tibet, in the 7th and 11th centuries, eliding the formative early contributions of Sinitic sources, principally imparted from the Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang, a crucial locus of interaction between Tibetan and Chinese cultures in the 8th-11th centuries.

Evidence from Manuscripts

Manuscripts preserved in the Dunhuang caves evidence this Sino-Tibetan nexus in native compositions and translations from Chinese into Tibetan. Efforts to trace Chinese and Sino-Tibetan influences on the formation of Tibetan Buddhism have been largely impressionistic. However, state-of-the-art tools such as Handwritten Text Recognition to digitize manuscripts allow their systematic analysis, and others permit us to identify “fingerprints” of Tibetan translations from Chinese.

Project Goals

BEST will locate scriptures and other materials of Sinitic origin, and trace their impact on Tibetan Buddhism. Starting with an examination of the reasons for the prominence of Dunhuang, we will uncover the conditions permitting the site to become such a multicultural center, cradle to a high level of Buddhist scholarship.

Research Focus

Identifying Sinitic sources introduced into Tibet in the early period, we will probe their later importance, challenging the tradition's polemical historiography which represses such recognition.

Deliverables

We will produce a historical study addressing the background of Dunhuang's scholastic Buddhist culture, including:

1. Studies of individual Tibetan translations from Chinese
2. Linguistic studies of the Chinese-Tibetan lexical interface
3. Studies on the most prominent Dunhuang monk-translator, Chos grub
4. Investigations of later Tibetan historiographical works
5. A database of Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts

All these efforts will contribute to a fundamental revaluation of formative influences on early Tibetan Buddhism.