Namgyal Monastery lies at an altitude of 3,850 meters, on a hill west of Lo Möntang, the old capital of the Mustang kingdom, a very remote region in the Nepalese-Tibetan borderlands. While its foundation goes back to earlier times, its fifteenth- century enlargement established it as a thriving Buddhist institution providing a home to a huge number of monks and a remarkable collection of Buddhist material culture including statues, thangkas, and manuscripts.
Among these various sacred objects, two collections of Buddhist canonical literature stand out for their age and complex illumination programmes.This book presents the visual and textual contents of these two sets of Buddhist manuscripts and analyses them from the perspectives of manuscript studies, art history, and textual analysis.
目次
Preface and Acknowledgements 7 Conventions 10 Introduction: Buddhist Heritage in Mustang 15 Chapter One: The Manuscripts at Namgyal: Codicology, Orthography, and Paleography 27 Catalogue One: Prajnaparamita Set 45 Chapter Two: Illumination Programs: The Visual Subtext of Two Text Collections 93 Catalogue Two: Sutra Collection 145 Chapter Three: The Textual Contents of the Namgyal Manuscripts: Beyond the Mainstream Kanjurs 341 Concluding Remarks: Historical Traces, Visual Pointers, and Potential Prospects of the Namgyal Manuscripts 363 Bibliography 370 Indices 379
