Sutra Copies

In seeking to establish a datable baseline for codicological, paleographical, orthographical, and grammatical features, we emphasized a group of Chinese and Tibetan sutras officially commissioned from 826 to approximately 841 as a gift for the Tibetan emperor. The gift consisted of eight copies of the Tibetan Śatasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā-sūtra, three copies of Chinese Mahāprajñāpāramitā-sūtra, and thousands of copies of the Chinese and Tibetan Aparimitāyur-nāma mahāyāna-sūtra.

Among the outputs concerning these sutras:

• A book-length study of the Tibetan copies of the Aparimitāyur-nāma mahāyāna-sūtra kept in the British Library is being prepared by Brandon Dotson, Lewis Doney, and Dorje Thondup.
• Brandon Dotson, Kazushi Iwao, and Tsuguhito Takeuchi, eds, Scribes, Texts, and Rituals in Early Tibet and Dunhuang (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2013).
• Brandon Dotson, “The Remains of the Dharma: Editing, Rejecting, and Replacing the Buddha’s Words in Officially Commissioned Sūtras from Dunhuang, 820s to 840s,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 36-37 (2013-2014): 5–68.
• Brandon Dotson, “Failed Prototypes: Foliation and Numbering in Ninth-Century Tibetan Śatasāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtras,” Journal Asiatique 303.1 (2015): 153–64.
• Brandon Dotson, “Misspelling “Buddha: the Officially Commissioned Tibetan Aparimitāyur-nāma mahāyāna-sūtras from Dunhuang and the Study of Old Tibetan Orthography,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 79.1 (2016): 129–51.