In 2002, around 12,000 folio manuscript pages constituting something like 150 texts were discovered in Phuri, an ancient place in the Gung thang Kingdom, near the northern border of modern Nepal. Details of this discovery have recently been made available to scholars in the catalogue Phu ri Manuscripts (2018, 2 vols.) published by the Tibetan Ancient Books Research Institute, Tibet University. Most of the Phu ri manuscripts are ritual texts, dated between the 10th and 13th centuries, the beginning of the Tibetan period of the second diffusion (phyi dar) or that of fragmentation (sil bu’i skabs).
This paper examines the ritual texts in the Phu ri manuscripts, and those bringing down thunder and hail in particular (ser ba dang thog dbab pa’i man ngag, T.P.137); it also considers the transmission of Buddhism to Western Tibet at the beginning of the period of the second diffusion.
