Bulletin of SOAS, 79, 1 (2016), 129–151. © SOAS, University of London, 2016.

doi:10.1017/S0041977X15000981

Misspelling “Buddha”: The officially

commissioned Tibetan Aparimitāyur-nāma
mahāyāna-sūtras from Dunhuang and the study
of Old Tibetan orthography
Brandon Dotson
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
[email protected]

Abstract
Drawing on the archival study of over 1,600 copies of the Tibetan
Aparimitāyur-nāma mahāyāna-sūtra (Tib.: Tshe dpag du myed pa’i
mdo) produced in Dunhuang from the 820s to the 840s and now kept in
the British Library, this article sheds light on the orthographic norms of
Middle Old Tibetan writing. Based on editors’ corrections, and on a corpus
of nearly 200 transcribed explicits, the article compares the orthographic
norms of this group of sutras with those of other dated Old Tibetan manu-
scripts and inscriptions. It proposes that among the most important markers
for dating Old Tibetan writing are the increased use in the tenth century of
the ’i(s) form of the genitive and ergative particles as a separate syllable,
and the relative absence of the tu form of the terminative particle in Middle
Old Tibetan writing. Additionally, the study offers suggestions concerning
the development of the various forms of Tibetan case particles.
Keywords: Old Tibetan language, Orthography, Grammar, Editors,
Scribes, Sutras

The root texts of the Tibetan grammatical tradition are the Lung ston pa rtsa ba
sum cu pa (widely known as the Sum cu pa) and the Rtags kyi ’jugs pa.1 These
are attributed to the putative inventor of the Tibetan script, Thonmi Sambhota,̣ a
possibly legendary councillor of Emperor Khri Srong rtsan, alias Srong brtsan
sgam po (c. 605–649). The Sum cu pa establishes, among other things, the
norms for how one uses grammatical particles. Tibetan children and beginner
language students often recite its verses or those of simpler primers, and this
allows them to know, for example, that following a g or ng suffix, one should
use the gi form of the genitive particle, and not the kyi or gyi form. As a
clear set of widely known standards, these orthographic norms serve one well
when editing Classical Tibetan texts. If a seventeenth-century commentarial
text, for example, uses kyi where one should find gi, then one can be confident
that this is not a variant, but an error. The problem is more difficult, however,

1 I gratefully acknowledge the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the German
Federal Ministry of Education and Research, who support the research project
“Kingship and Religion in Tibet”, under whose auspices this research was conducted.
130 BRANDON DOTSON

when one considers the orthographic standards of Old Tibetan writing. Early
Old Tibetan (mid-seventh to mid-eighth century), Middle Old Tibetan (late
eighth to mid-ninth century), and Late Old Tibetan writings (late ninth to
early twelfth century) do not follow Thonmi’s norms. Indeed, texts of each of
these three periods have their own orthographic norms that distinguish them.2
One obvious reason that many Old Tibetan writings follow norms that differ
from the later Tibetan grammatical tradition is that the Sum cu pa and the
Rtags kyi ’jugs pa – and even more so the commentarial tradition that draws
upon and reinterprets them – date to a later period.3 Here Tibetan love for a
glorious precedent, and a tendency to ancestralize their traditions, has produced
an anomalous account, namely that of a language that has remained the same
from its inception to the present. There is no need to debunk this position by
pointing out its impossibility, nor to single out any credulous investigators
who have too readily imbibed it; this ground is well trodden.4 Rather, we
must ask ourselves the more productive questions of which norms predominated
prior to the emergence of Classical Tibetan or standard Written Tibetan – inten-
tionally leaving these categories undefined – and how one can establish what
these were. The norms of the later Tibetan grammatical tradition are convenient
as a reference point for such a task, but it is from the evidence of Old Tibetan
writings themselves that we must identify the prevailing orthographic standards.
To this end, the present article examines officially sponsored sutras in order to
uncover the orthographic norms relevant in Dunhuang from the 820s to the 840s,
and to point out some of their relationships to earlier and later norms.
Drawing on the 1,650 copies of the Aparimitāyur-nāma mahāyāna-sūtra held
in the British Library, one is able to contribute something towards a baseline of
the standard orthography of the 820s to 840s. Selecting this particular sutra has
many advantages. In the first place it is short and repetitive. This makes it fairly
simple to transcribe explicits with which to build a searchable corpus. Second,
about 30 per cent of the sutras were edited by rotating teams of three editors,
implying that there was a quality control system and at least some concern
with the orthography and content of these officially sponsored sutras. Third,
the scribes were mostly Chinese who learned Tibetan as a foreign language,
and did so, as we see from one interesting marginal note, with recourse to a
grammatical treatise. Fourth, the scribes who copied these sutras and the editors
who corrected them worked not only on other officially sponsored sutras such as
the Chinese Aparimitāyur-nāma mahāyāna-sūtra, Tibetan Śatasāhasrikāprajñā-
pāramitā-sūtra, Chinese Mahāprajñāpāramitā-sūtra, but also on secular docu-
ments. This is evident from their jottings of letters and petitions, and from the
character of the texts that they used as patches to repair torn sutras. The orthog-
raphy represented in these sutra copies, therefore, is not particular to this genre,

2 On this admittedly provisional periodization of Old Tibetan, and on the grammatical and
sociolinguistic markers that characterize early, middle and late Old Tibetan, see Takeuchi
2012.
3 See Miller 1963 and Miller 1993. The dates of these treatises are in fact more compli-
cated, since some of their contents clearly refer to earlier orthographic norms than
those that became standard for Classical Tibetan.
4 See Miller 1993.
 MISSPELLING “BUDDHA” 131

but represents the scribal practice of those who also wrote many of the secular
and official Tibetan documents that lay alongside the sutras in Mogao Cave 17.
The results, as one might expect, evince an orthography that is considerably less
settled than what we find today. At the same time, one can distinguish some
clear orthographic norms, some of which emerge as significant for dating
Tibetan writing.

Orthography and the Tibetan grammatical tradition

It is beyond the scope of this article, and would in any case be redundant, to
review or summarize the indigenous Tibetan grammatical tradition and to survey
secondary scholarship on the evolution of Tibetan grammar. It will be helpful,
however, briefly to contextualize the study of Old Tibetan orthography. To be
sure, dozens of scholars – nearly everyone who has worked with Old Tibetan
manuscripts or inscriptions – have made observations on the orthographies pecu-
liar to the texts that they study. It is commonplace to note the customary use of
the ma ya btags with i and e vowels (e.g. myi and mye), the preponderance of da
drag (e.g. gsold), medial ’a (e.g. bka’s), a’ suffixes (e.g. pa’), reverse gi gu (also
known as gi log), alternation between aspirated and unaspirated consonants (e.g.
chen pho and chen po), and the absence of a disambiguating wa zur (e.g. dags
instead of dvags). In the first phases of scholarship on such writings, it was
deemed sufficient to record the presence or absence of such features. This
method was largely a result of the fact that a given study might be more focused
on the content of a text rather than its form. As a result, orthography was only
superficially treated. One consequence of this was (and in some corners still
remains) the misapprehension that Old Tibetan orthography is a haphazard
free-for-all. This faulty assumption has been extremely valuable to those philol-
ogists who have wielded it to grant themselves the remarkable privilege of chan-
ging the orthography of words that they do not know until they become words
that they do.
Among those who have gone beyond mere documentation to consider the
relevance of such forms to an underlying grammatical system, mention should
first be made of Jacques Bacot. In his 1928 study of the Sum cu pa, Bacot
noted the presence of a few ślokas in this text that describe orthographic
norms different from those of standard Classical Tibetan. In particular, Bacot
observed that śloka 8 prescribed the joining of the terminative particle to the pre-
ceding suffix without the insertion of the intersyllabic marker (tsheg), e.g.
phyogsu rather than phyogs su. Bacot concluded that this must in fact have
reflected the previous norm (Bacot 1928: 14, n. 2). In 1963 Roy Andrew
Miller built on Bacot’s work in his own analysis of the Sum cu pa. Miller per-
ceived distinct temporal strata in the text, and singled out ślokas 8 and 13 as
representing orthographic standards that predate standard Written Tibetan.
Regarding the terminative in śloka 8, Miller ratified Bacot’s findings, and further
related them to Dunhuang manuscripts transcribed by F.W. Thomas. In these
Miller encountered some instances that followed the prescriptions in śloka 8,
e.g. sharu instead of shar ru, but also found many that adhered to the later
norms, e.g. yar ru (Miller 1963: 494). Miller made the further suggestion that
śloka 8, when shorn of what he argues is an interpolated line, shows no
132 BRANDON DOTSON

awareness of the form tu (Miller 1963: 496; Miller 1993: 44–5). Here Miller
again looked to Thomas’s corpus and to other early texts to conclude that
“the later orthographic convention governing tu was not employed in many
instances”. Looking to śloka 13, Miller noted that, as in śloka 8, it prescribes
adding only a vowel, rather than a sandhi-appropriate consonant separated by
a tsheg. In this case it relates to the semi-final particle in forms such as byede
rather than byed de. The verse mentions ste as a semi-final particle, but not
te, and it does not mention de as a separate syllable (Miller 1963: 494–5).
(Classical Tibetan norms are te after n, r, l, and s; ste after g, ng, b, m, ’a, or
vowel; and de after d.)
Bacot’s and Miller’s claims about ślokas 8 and 13 of the Sum cu pa reflecting
an earlier set of norms can be tested against the transliterated corpus of Old
Tibetan documents. As we shall explain below, one must be careful in this
case to construct an orthographic baseline from texts that are reliably dated,
rather than from those that float in time. For this purpose, I have chosen the offi-
cially sponsored Tibetan sutras produced from the 820s to the 840s, and in par-
ticular the Aparimitāyur-nāma mahāyāna-sūtra. In studying these sutras, along
with the other officially sponsored sutras produced at the same time, I have also
turned up some evidence that is relevant to the existence of early Tibetan gram-
mars during this period. In the margin of a discarded folio of a pothī-format
Śatasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā-sūtra produced in Shazhou (Dunhuang), one
finds the following jotting: “taking as a model The Thirty Letters, The
Treatise That Teaches All Who Would Learn Letters, memorize it and recite
it!” ( yig slobs kun la stan pa’i mdo/ yi ge sum cu dpe zhag pa/ brtsongs la
grus; PT 1382, 196r).5 This is remarkable for the fact that it refers to a treatise
– short title Yi ge sum cu, long title Yig slobs kun la stan pa’i mdo yi ge sum cu –
with a title that recalls the famous Lung ston pa rtsa ba sum cu pa attributed to
Thonmi Sambhota.̣ This does not constitute proof that the Sum cu pa existed at
this time, but if the jotting dates to the time of the sutra-copying project, then the
injunction bears witness to a book of grammar that was probably used, among
other things, to train Chinese scribes in Tibetan language. As a didactic grammar
of the Tibetan language, this could well be a predecessor to the Sum cu pa. In
any case, the norms of this text, if they are at all reflected by the actual writings
of the sutra scribes, were, as we shall see, significantly different from those of
the Sum cu pa.

Digital humanities and Old Tibetan orthography

With the rise of digital humanities and the work of Old Tibetan Documents
Online (OTDO), it is now possible to search a large corpus of reliable translitera-
tions in a matter of seconds.6 In many cases one can also easily check

5 I take brtsongs to be the imperative form of the causative of ’tshang, “to press into”; Hill
2010: 237. For the study of SP folia in which I came across this jotting, see Dotson
2013–14.
6 See Imaeda et al. 2007; and Iwao et al. 2009. These and further transliterations are
searchable through the OTDO website, http://otdo.aa.tufs.ac.jp/ (old website) and
http://otdo.aa-ken.jp (new website).
 MISSPELLING “BUDDHA” 133

transliterations against high-quality digital images of the manuscripts, freely

available online through the International Dunhuang Project and other
resources.7 The expansion of this transliterated corpus, in tandem with simple
electronic search tools, has significantly broadened the horizons for the study
of early Tibetan orthography. Besides focusing on narrow queries such as the
morphology of the terminative and semi-final particles, one can make a quanti-
tative analysis of the orthography of multiple features of Tibetan writing in a
given document or group of documents. We have now gone beyond documen-
tation and merely mentioning the presence or absence of certain orthographic
features to their systematic documentation and quantification.8 As a result, it
is possible to determine the orthographic norms of a given text – provided it
is of sufficient length – and thereby to gain some certainty about which sorts
of editorial interventions are justified, and which are not. One also creates a
basis for comparing the orthographic standards of one text with those of another.
Amid the undoubted advantages that digital humanities brings to the study of
orthography, there are also some complications. In the first place, the researcher
is limited by the extent and the bias of the transliterated corpus, and the manner
in which s/he negotiates it. If “Old Tibetan” includes early, middle, and late Old
Tibetan texts, and one searches the entirety of a large corpus (e.g. all of OTDO),
then one can only make judgements about a range that includes hundreds of
years of language use. These judgements will necessarily be quite broad and
also quite superficial. Rather, one must study the texts individually or in coher-
ent groups. Among further complications, the corpus is heterogeneous, not only
in terms of media, date and location (e.g. central Tibetan inscriptions versus
Dunhuang manuscripts), but also as regards genre and authorship. The Bsam
yas Inscription (c. 779) and the Dbon zhang Inscription (823), for example,
are both official documents issued by the Tibetan court. In terms of orthography,
one can generally make the assumption that the forms one finds there were
deemed “correct” at their respective times of carving. This is also largely true
of official letters and administrative documents from Dunhuang, and copies of
bureaucratic records such as the Old Tibetan Annals. On the other hand, the cor-
pus contains Buddhist and non-Buddhist ritual texts written by people of diverse
educational backgrounds. Orthography in official documents was not strictly
morphemic, but also phonemic in the sense that one finds, to name just one
example, alternation between aspirated and unaspirated voiceless consonants
(e.g. chen pho, cen po, cen pho, and chen po). Phonemic spellings are generally
more common in non-official texts, and one also finds simple errors that result
from partial literacy, that is, the writer’s distance from the orthographic standards
of the day. In a few cases sloppy writing that employs non-standard ductus rein-
forces the impression of partial literacy.9 Moreover, outside of official letters and
contracts, most Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts are undated. This is not to dis-
qualify such writings as suitable objects of study; far from it, as one often learns
more about the language by studying non-standard Tibetan writings. On the

7 See http://idp.bl.uk; http://gallica.bnf.fr; and http://www.artstor.org.

8 See Dotson and Helman-Waz ̣ny forthcoming.
9 For an example, focusing on the ductus of the letter ja, see van Schaik and Galambos
2012: 33–4.
134 BRANDON DOTSON

other hand, if one wishes to establish the “correct” orthography of writing in a

given time and place, one must look to texts with high standards of literacy.
We see distinct orthographic changes from the earliest datable central Tibetan
inscription, the Sri Pillar (aka Zhol Pillar, north and south faces) of c. 764 to the
latest, the Dbon zhang Pillar of 823, so one obviously must periodize ortho-
graphic observations in order to avoid anachronism. Not only temporal, but
also geographical considerations must be taken into account. If we speak of a
“standard Dbon zhang Pillar orthography” for the decades on either side of
823, for example, can we also apply this to Tibetan documents written in far-
away Dunhuang during this same period? The official documents written in
or near Dunhuang offer a baseline for comparison that is more appropriate in
terms of medium and regional provenance, but one in which many of the
dates of the official documents, given as they are in the form of a given year
of the twelve-year cycle, have an uncertainty of ±12 years. Besides that, these
documents are usually short, so the data that one gleans from any one of
them is not so indicative as it would be in a longer document. Some
Dunhuang manuscripts also bring with them the further complication of being
written by scribes whose first language was not Tibetan. The vast majority of
the sutra scribes, for example, were Chinese. Some of the phonemic spellings
that one finds here may therefore reflect a special situation relevant to the man-
ner in which Tibetan phonetics were heard and then written by
mid-ninth-century Chinese speakers in Dunhuang. This is a point that we
shall explore below.
The question of “standard” orthography brings us to a genre that has received
increased attention in recent years: officially commissioned sutras.10 There are
other groups of officially commissioned Chinese sutras from Dunhuang, but
the group on which I focus were commissioned for the Tibetan emperor
Khri Gtsug lde brtsan (r. 815–841) from the 820s to the 840s.11 The project
involved the production of thousands of copies of the Śatasāhasrikāprajñāpār-
amitā-sūtra (hereafter, SP) in Tibetan, the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-sūtra (here-
after, MP) in Chinese, and the Aparimitāyur-nāma mahāyāna-sūtra (hereafter,
Ap) in Chinese and Tibetan. Some of these sutras were produced in eastern
Tibet, but the vast majority were written in the scriptoria of Shazhou, mostly by
Chinese scribes. There are several good reasons for focusing on this group of
documents. The MP, SP, and the Chinese and Tibetan Ap constitute a large pro-
portion of the Dunhuang manuscripts. There are over a thousand Tibetan Ap cop-
ies or fragments of copies in the British Library and a similar number in the
Bibliothèque nationale de France.12 Around 500 copies are also found in the
libraries of the Dunhuang Museum, the Dunhuang Academy, the Jiuquan

10 See, for example, Ma 2009, Ska ba 2009, Zhang 2010, Iwao 2012 and 2013, Taenzer
2012: 110–54, Takeuchi 2013, Matko and van Schaik 2013, Dotson et al. forthcoming,
and Dotson 2013–14.
11 On these dates see Fujieda 1961: 79, and Dotson 2013–14: 10–15.
12 In his catalogue, Nishioka (1984: 320) counted 657 Ap copies in the 950 texts between
shelfmarks Pelliot tibétain 3500 and 4450. Nishioka worked from microfilm from which
shelfmarks 2225–3499 were missing. Unfortunately, many of these manuscripts have not
been digitized.
 MISSPELLING “BUDDHA” 135

Museum, Zhangye Museum, and Lanzhou Library, and over 200 are conserved
in the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St. Petersburg. Many are also kept in
Japan, and four are kept in Taiwan.13 Apart from their being so numerous, the
Ap are ideal for the study of orthography because, unlike the much longer SP,
each sutra is written by a single scribe, and is of a manageable, yet significant
length (c. 2,500 syllables). The Ap are particularly useful for the study of orthog-
raphy in that most intact copies contain colophons that list the name of the
scribe. One-third of the sutra copies were edited, and the colophons of the edited
sutras additionally contain the names of the editors, of which there were custom-
arily three. Given the prestige associated with an officially commissioned sutra-
copying project, the close regulation of textual production, and an editorial sys-
tem that included three editors, one can assume that this material would display a
general adherence to orthographic and lexicographic norms. As such, it repre-
sents an excellent source for information concerning what constituted an error
in the minds of scribes and editors of the 820s to 840s in Dunhuang.
The data that I analyse is drawn from research that Lewis Doney and I carried
out in 2013 and 2014, along with some initial work by Dongzhi Duojie. This
consists of a study of all of the Tibetan Ap copies kept in the British Library,
where 1,345 shelfmarks include copies or fragments of copies of Ap, and
1,208 of these are sub-shelfmarks under the shelfmark ITJ 310. I supplement
this with data recorded from selected Ap copies held at the Bibliothèque natio-
nale de France. These, as I shall describe below, are editors’ copies that likely
served as scribal and editorial exemplars. While the study recorded data regard-
ing the codicology and format of the manuscripts, I focus here mainly on the
orthography of the 188 transcribed explicits and, to a lesser extent, the editorial
corrections. These transcribed explicits form a searchable sample from which to
draw conclusions about orthographic norms. In order to have a fixed point of
reference for the corrections throughout each sutra, we noted them not where
they appeared in each copy, but on the corresponding line in a transliterated
Ap copy. This was PT 3901, which had eight columns, to which I assigned
the corresponding first eight letters of the alphabet. Thus a correction that we
record in a given Ap copy may, for example, be at “d3”, which means that it
was in the passage that appears in the third line of the fourth column of PT
3901. A transliteration of the latter, as well as a presentation of the data on
which I draw here, is included in Dotson et al. forthcoming.

The Aparimitāyur-nāma mahāyāna-sūtra and its editing

The state of the Ap manuscripts offers a window into the editorial process. Stein
found them in bundles, to which he assigned site numbers. These bundles con-
sist either of unedited sutras in multiple-sutra or single-sutra rolls, or of mostly
edited, single-sutra rolls. The production of the latter can be summarized as fol-
lows.14 Scribes were issued with paper and ink, and the amounts were noted in a

13 For catalogues and studies of these collections and/or their colophons, see Ishihama and
Yoshimura 1958, Wu 1975, Huang 1982, Nishioka 1984, Savitsky 1984 and 1991, Ma
2011, Matko and van Schaik 2013 and Dotson et al. forthcoming.
14 On the production of the former, and further distinctions between these two groups, see
Dotson et al. forthcoming.
136 BRANDON DOTSON

record. They copied sutras based on exemplars that the editors provided for
them. These exemplars were copied either visually or aurally into large rolls
comprising up to 45 sheets of paper and containing up to 15 sutras. Before or
during submission to editors, they were “signed” or ascribed by the scribe to
himself/herself or to a client scribe, and each sutra in the long roll was separated
into an individual roll of one sutra each. A team of three editors then edited the
sutras, usually with red ink. This, too, was completed with recourse to compari-
son with an editorial copy, which was compared (gtugs) with the sutra. In prac-
tice, the corrections come mostly from a single hand, and it is likely that the
secondary editors looked over and ratified the main editor’s work. The colophon
gives their names, which are usually written in a single hand, probably that of
the main editor. After the editing was completed, a sutra was finalized (gtan
la phab), and submitted to a further office. Eventually, the finished products
were organized into bundles, accounted for, and, as we know from PT 999,
deposited in temples such as Longxing si, Dunhuang’s main monastery.
Unlike the folia of pothī-format SP, or the panels of roll-format SP, the Ap
very rarely include jottings. The paper, which is generally in good condition,
has not been patched with cuttings from other manuscripts. It is also rare to
find Ap torn or marked by editors to show that they are rejected and to be dis-
carded. In this they differ from SP folia, which were rejected on account of miss-
ing lines and half-lines that editors had to insert. Such folia were replaced with
pristine, rewritten folia.15 The Ap editorial process, by contrast, appears to toler-
ate, or even expect, a final product that includes editorial corrections. This may
be due to the nature of the text, whose purpose is to be copied, recited, etc. in
order to achieve the aims enumerated therein, and which therefore might lend
itself to more streamlined mass production (Iwao 2012: 103).
Our hope was that the editors would be pedants whose interventions extended
to the correction of the sandhi of grammatical particles. In this we were disap-
pointed, if not entirely surprised, that they were nothing of the sort. The overall
impression is of an overburdened composition teacher, grading hundreds of
essays in one sitting. The editors’ primary concern seems to have been the com-
pleteness of the sutra. This is evident from the colophon of ITJ 310.1045: “addi-
tions and omissions having been corrected, it is finalized” (lhag chad bcos nas
gtan phab bo). Indeed, completeness is emphasized in the vocabulary of Tibetan
editing: a good copy has neither omission nor addition (chad lhag ma mchis), a
dictum that applies on the level of phrases, lines and chapters, but also on the
level of prefixes, suffixes, and words.16 The ethic for completeness is further
evident in the long insertions that one occasionally finds running all the way
up the gutter.
As we are principally concerned here with orthography, it is necessary to
have some idea of the text’s content so that we may contextualize the “errors”
that the editors correct, those that they let pass, and those that they introduce.
I give here only the briefest of summaries, and refer the reader to published

15 For a detailed study of this editorial process, see Dotson 2013–14: 35–56.
16 See, for example, Bu ston’s exhortation that scribes commit neither omissions nor addi-
tions (Schaeffer 2009: 22).
 MISSPELLING “BUDDHA” 137

translations.17 As a dhāran ̣ī sutra, the Ap is fairly simple, and it is repetitive.

After a standard introduction setting the scene for the Buddha’s sermon, the
sutra extols the benefits of its dhāran ̣ī again and again (23 times in our example
text) to punctuate statements about the virtues of the sutra, and the different
rewards that one gains from reciting, copying, worshipping or causing others
to do the same. Among the various benefits are long life, wealth, purification
and rebirth in Sukāhvatī. The sutra ends with the gathered crowd rejoicing
at the Buddha’s teaching, and a statement that the Aparimitāyur-nāma
mahāyāna-sūtra is complete. This is followed by a colophon giving the
names of the scribe and, when applicable, the names of the editors.
The Ap’s emphasis on producing physical copies has played a central role in
discussions of the cult of the book in Buddhism.18 The doxographical status of
this sutra – or dhāran ̣ī sutra – has also been the object of discussion.19 The Dun-
huang versions differ from the two versions contained in the Derge Kanjur not
only with respect to the title – the latter are the Aparimitāyurjñāna-nāma
mahāyāna-sūtra (Tshe dang ye shes dpag tu med pa zhes bya ba theg pa
chen po’i mdo) – but also in terms of the respective lengths of their dhāran ̣ī.
In fact, some of the Tibetan Dunhuang Ap use a shorter dhāran ̣ī and some a
longer one, as noted by Akira Fujieda and Daishun Ueyama (1962). The sutras’
contents are otherwise identical, save for a few anomalies that shall not be dis-
cussed here.
The most challenging aspect of copying this text, from the scribe’s perspec-
tive, is the repetition. Due to the nature of the text and the recurrence of the
dhāran ̣ī, it is very easy to skip a short passage, either due to eyeskip by the
scribe or by a reader giving dictation. The rendering of foreign place names
(e.g. Dza’ ta’i tshal for Jetavana) and foreign terms (e.g. ka sha ni ’ga’ for
kārsāpan
̣ ̣a, an Indian coin) is by comparison only a minor annoyance. The con-
tent and vocabulary of the sutra are elementary, apart from two sentences that
make use of the contrastive or adversative use of the genitive, and which con-
sistently gave the scribes problems. The second of these two sentences is as
follows:

’dI lta ste rgya mtsho chen po bzhI’i chus yongs su gang ba’I thIgs pa re re
nas bgrang bar nus gyI tshe dpag du myed pa’i mdo ‘di bsod nams gyI
phung po’i tshad ni bgrang bar myI nus so / (Adversative gyI in italics.
The corresponding lines in PT 3901 are f11–13.)20

17 See Silk 2004; Payne 2007; and Halkias 2013.

18 Schopen 1975: 160.
19 See Payne 2007. This also includes an English translation of the German translation from
the Sanskrit in Walleser 1916. There is an edition in Konow 1916, and a discussion and
translation in Halkias 2013: 68–74.
20 The transliteration of Old Tibetan generally follows the system outlined in Imaeda 2011.
One exception is the treatment of subscribed ’a. Where this is subscribed under a sen-
tence final particle such as so, Imaeda transcribes “s’o” on the grounds that it should
be treated like a subscript. By contrast, I treat it as a non-standard consonant stack,
and use the plus sign, e.g., “so+’.” Of course the extended Wylie solution of using
“sO” is more graceful, but Old Tibetanists use the capital I vowel for the reverse gi
gu, so capitalizing other vowels in the case of a subscribed ’a would be inconsistent.
138 BRANDON DOTSON

“One may be able to count each drop of water that fills the four great
oceans, but one cannot count the extent of the heaps of merit of this
Aparimitāyuh ̣-sūtra.”

The most common error was to end the sentence with a second, redundant, myi
nus gyi instead of closing it with myi nus so. In some cases, as in PT 3901, the
editors missed this error. Another common mistake was to insert a negation in
the first clause, e.g. myi bgrang bar nus gyi, in which case many a dutiful editor
struck through the myi. A third, less grammatical but no less common, error in
this particular passage was to write rgyal po chen po bzhi (“the four great
kings”) instead of rgya mtsho chen po bzhi (“the four great oceans”). The
four great kings occur elsewhere in the text and may also be an understandable
substitution based on their comparative ubiquity in a Chinese milieu. Indeed a
letter or draft letter, PT 1018, instructs the monk Bar ’byor to make
beautiful carvings of the four great kings on the wooden boards (glegs shing)
that form the “book covers” – possibly for a volume of the
Śatasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā-sūtra.21
The editors’ deletions and insertions tend to be found in predictable passages
each time. The splashes of red are less a thorough correction of each error than a
visible sign that the editorial duty has been performed. The most frequent cor-
rections illustrate this well. With the exception of the dhāran ̣ī, which occurs
throughout the sutra, I refer to the line numbers of the transliterated Ap copy
PT 3901 to indicate in which passage the corrections are found.

dhāran ̣ī: de to dhe; insertion of na mo where left off

a7: de na to de nas
a9: stsogs pa to la stsogs pa
a11: bzhugs ’tsho to bzhugs shing ’tsho
b7, c11, e15, f2: gang zhig to gang la la zhig
b10: ’gyur ro to ’gyur to
c16: myI ’gyur te to myI ’gyur to
c16: myI ’gyur ro to myI ’gyur to
e6 and e12: mdo to mdo sde
f7: rin che to rin p(h)o che
f11: rgyal po chen po bzhi to rgya mtsho chen po bzhi
f13: nus kyi to nuso

Less frequently, editors corrected the sutra’s title. In one case the scribe cor-
rected himself at brgya dkar skad du (ITJ 310.111), but in another the same
error goes uncorrected (ITJ 310.212). In several cases the Sanskrit title had to
be corrected. In a few instances we have na ma ma ha na ya corrected to to
na ma ma ha ya na (ITJ 310.788; ITJ 310.1119). This is an understandable mis-
take when one remembers that the dhāran ̣ī ends “ma ha na ya pa ri ba re sva
ha”, and the scribe will go on to write this multiple times. The mistake is fully
realized with this struck-through implicit at ITJ 310.1167: $/:/ rgya gar skad du

21 For a partial transliteration, see Lalou 1950: 38.

 MISSPELLING “BUDDHA” 139

^a pa rI mi ta ^ yur nya na su bI ni sci ta ra dza ya ta tha ga ta ya tad thya tha

^om sa rba sang ska ra pa ri shud dha/ dhar ma te ga ga na sa mu dga’ te sba
bha ba bi shud de ma ha na ya pa rI ba re sva hA/ / $/:/ rgya gar skad du ^a pa
rI mi ta / ^a yur na ma ma ha ya na su tra /. The Tibetan title, too, often required
correction: in ITJ 310.523, tshe dpa zhes bya ba’ is corrected to tshe dpag du
myed pa zhes bya ba’.
Lest one assume that such errors are due only to the circumstance of having
Chinese scribes write in Tibetan, a second language, one can point to compar-
able howlers in Chinese Ap copies. In the end title (weiti 尾題) of Or.8210/S.68,
for example, the title is given as Foshuo wuliangshou yaozong jing 佛說无量壽
要宗經 instead of Foshuo wuliangshou zongyao jing 佛說无量壽宗要經.
It is also instructive to examine what the editors have either introduced or left
to stand. One consequence of the light-touch model of editing that operated here
is that in nearly every sutra one can find errors that have been overlooked. In the
sample sutra PT 3901, for example, ’jig rten is spelled ’jin rten in line a8, ri rab
is rib rab in line d4, and the negation myed is misspelled myis at line f9. More
interesting are those cases where editors have corrected a word, but done so in a
way that allows for variation. To name a few examples taken from our data, we
observe that in correcting bzhugs ’tsho’ to bzhugs shing ’tsho’, the editor did not
strike through the suffix at the end of ’tsho’ (ITJ 310.104). Similarly, in this
same passage in a separate sutra, an editor has corrected tso to ’tso, rather
than ’tsho (ITJ 310.248). At a9, between yon tan dpag du myed pa and zhes
bya, an editor inserted in red lastsogs pa, and not la stsogs pa or las stsogs
pa (ITJ 310.343). In another copy, in the final sentence at g18, ’ga’ go is cor-
rected to ’ga’o, rather than dga’o (ITJ 310.1030).
There is no doubt that editors sometimes introduced errors. To note one of the
worst, in ITJ 310.554, an editor “corrects” sangs rgyas to sang rgyas at line f16,
thus misspelling the word for Buddha.
There were a few intriguing hints of pedantry where editors have corrected
grammatical particles. One editor corrected tshe’ang to tshe yang at b1 (ITJ
310.694). Another, in the passage from g1–g13, thrice corrected stobs gis to
stobs gyis; and corrected rten gI to rten gyI at both e17 and g17 (ITJ
310.694). Incidentally, the scribe does use kyi(s) elsewhere in this manuscript,
and the editor lets it stand. Another instance of orthographic correction, apart
from the most common corrections listed above, is the correction of bud med
to bud myed at e13 (ITJ 310.1116).
These examples serve to give one an idea of the sort of editing that was per-
formed. Editorial thoroughness varied from one copy to another, and individual
teams of editors had their own respective modus operandi in terms of which pas-
sages they tended to flag up. Their edits are helpful in gauging the difference
between an acceptable variant and an unacceptable error. At the same time,
and as a result of the fact that different teams of editors worked on these sutras,
there is little global consistency in these insertions and corrections, and indeed
there are some clear cases where one editorial team’s correction is another
team’s error, as we shall see below in the context of the use of dga’ ’o versus
dga go in the explicit. Stepping back from the content of their editing, the
editors’ red or black corrections are visual evidence that they have discharged
their duties in the sutra-copying project. This is not to say that their relatively
140 BRANDON DOTSON

laissez-faire editorial style indicates an absence of orthographic norms. Indeed,

to obtain a less impressionistic perspective on the orthography of these sutras it
is more helpful to turn to quantitative data supplied by our transcribed explicits.

Explicit orthography
The final part of the sutra, just before the colophon, reads: “and all were truly
pleased at what the bhagavān said. The Aparimitāyur-nāma mahāyāna-sūtra
is complete”. One more or less “correct” version of this reads de thams chad
/ bcom ldan ’da’s gyis gsungs pa la mngon bar dga’ ’o /:/ / tshe dpag du
myed pa zhes bya ba theg pa chen po ’i mdo rdzogs so / /. To the uninitiated,
there might seem to be little room for variation in this ending. I shall proceed
through it slowly, therefore, to demonstrate exactly where the variation, and
the relevance to orthography, lies. In 188 searchable explicits, we find omissions
and additions, and we find variants or errors for nearly every syllable.
• “All that.” The explicit begins de thams chad. The word immediately preced-
ing is ’khor. In a few cases (e.g. ITJ 310.150 and PT 3951), scribes omit de,
and in one case it is inserted interline (ITJ 310.426). In one case, it is mis-
spelled te (ITJ 310.1011). A more acceptable variant is the plural de dag, and
we find 20 of these against 165 de. There is some interesting orthographic
variation in the word “all”. Spelled thams cad in Classical Tibetan, we
find three acceptable forms in our corpus. There are 86 thams cad, 79
thams chad, and 8 thams shad. One of the latter is spelled without tsheg,
e.g., dethamsshad (ITJ 310.981). In three cases, we find the anusvāra, e.g.
thaMs chad (ITJ 310.140 and 776) and thaMs shad (ITJ 310.258). We
find subscribed suffixes, e.g. tham+s chad, twice (ITJ 310.1021 and PT
3812). Among misspellings, we have 2 thams can (ITJ 310.1044 and ITJ
1658), 1 thams cadu (ITJ 310.449), 1 thaMs shas (ITJ 310.649), 1 thams
cas (ITJ 310.523), and 1 thams (ITJ 1687). We also find the correction
thams bchad (ITJ 310.94). The most egregious misspelling is tha ced at
PT 3648.
• “Bhagavān.” bcom ldan ’das may also be spelled with a medial ’a, e.g. bcom
ldan ’da’s. The aspirated bchom is also a variant. We find 170 bcom and 11
bchom. We also find 3 pcom, 2 brcom, and 1 mchom. In terms of corrections,
we find 2 mbcom, and 1 bmcom. Twice we find an anusvāra, e.g. bcoM (ITJ
310.258 and 1094). We find the form ldan 185 times, and ldand twice. There
is also 1 ltan (ITJ 1707), 1 ltaldan (ITJ 310.177), 1 ldag (ITJ 210.124), and
once ldan is elided, e.g. bcom ’da’s (ITJ 310.310). We also find 5 instances
where the word is corrected to ldan, e.g. ltdan (ITJ 310.1084) or ldadn (ITJ
310.111). There are 116 ’da’s, 70 ’das, 1 ’da (ITJ 310.352), and 1 ’da’
(ITJ 310.666). In one case, ’da is inserted interline, below the s suffix
(ITJ 310.517). In another case, we find ’da’ sa for ’das (ITJ 1488).
• Ergative. Besides the ergative kyis or gyis, we also find here the genitive kyi
or gyi. This error is not surprising, given the sentence structure. Still, the vast
majority of scribes were correct, as we find 146 ergative against 35 genitive,
and 5 instances where no particle is used, e.g. bcom ldan ’da’s gsungs pa. As
for the form or sandhi – and disregarding whether it is ergative or genitive or
 MISSPELLING “BUDDHA” 141

whether there is a gi gu or gi log (e.g. counting both kyI and kyis under the
rubric “kyi(s)”), we find 57 kyi(s), 120 gyi(s), 3 gi(s), 2 yi(s) and 1 kis (ITJ
310.612).
• “What he said (gsungs pa la).” The verb gsungs is found as such 176 times,
10 times as gsung, and once as stsungs (ITJ 310.228). In two of the above
cases we count gsung sa as gsungs. In 159 cases the nominal particle is
pa, in 13 cases it is ba, in 1 case pa’ (ITJ 310.730), and in 2 cases it is
absent. In one case it is an interlinear insertion (ITJ 310.94). In 167 cases
we find la, and in 15 cases las. In one case we find pa pa instead of pa
la (PT 3865).
• “Truly.” In 171 cases we find mngon bar, as opposed to 9 mngon par, 4
mgon bar, 1 mngond bar (ITJ 310.324), and 1 mngon du (ITJ 310.798).
We once find mngor corrected to mngon (ITJ 310.517).
• “Were pleased.” In 38 cases we find the dga’o one would expect in Classical
Tibetan. In 69 cases, a tsheg intervenes, e.g. dga’ ’o, in 11 cases we find
dga’’o, and we find 8 dga ’o. In 43 cases, we find the unexpected dga’
go. Where the verb’s suffix is left off we find 8 dga go, 1 dgago (ITJ
310.241), 2 dga ga’o (ITJ 310.248), and 1 dga ’go’ (ITJ 310.592).
Intriguingly, we find 7 cases where the sentence final particle go is struck
through and replaced with ’o. Once we find the misspelling gda’o (ITJ
1609).
• “The Aparimitāyur (tshe dpag du myed pa).” This part of the sutra’s end is
missing from 9 sutras of our sample, and is written twice in one. The sample
size is thus different from above. We find 174 tshe, 4 tse, 1 dtshe, and 1 che.
There are 167 dpag, 11 dphag, 1 dbag, and 1 pag. We never find the
expected tu, but rather have 181 du, and 1 omission (e.g. dpag myed; ITJ
310.318). We find 179 of the expected myed, and not a single med. In a
few cases, myid is corrected to myed, and in one case it is written myi.
This, it should be noted, is in a semi-literate outlier, PT 3648, on which
see fn. 29 below. Among the myed pa we include the correction myed
pa’I mdo ’di b pa (ITJ 310.235). There are 160 pa, 11 pa’, 6 pa’i, and 1
omission, e.g. myed pa’I zhes (ITJ 310.971). In 7 cases, we find pa’i.
• “nāma (zhes bya ba).” We find 171 zhes, 2 shes, 2 zhe – one of which is zhes
(ITJ 310.967) – and 1 omission (e.g. myed pa bya ba; ITJ 310.582). There
are others that skip even more text, e.g. tshe dpag du myed pa’i mdo at ITJ
1697. We find 1 instance of the correction shzhes (ITJ 310.34). Where bya
ba is expected we find 165 bya, 12 bye, 1 byas, and 2 missing (e.g. zhes theg,
zhes ba). In a few cases this is corrected, byea (ITJ 1600), and byas (ITJ
310.967). Once we also find the reverse “correction”, bya bye (ITJ
310.772). The nominal particle is follows: 171 ba, 3 ba’, 2 ba ’i, and 1 pa.
• “Mahāyāna-sūtra (theg pa chen po ’i mdo).” In theg pa we find 168 theg, 4
thig, 2 thegs, 2 then, 1 them, and several omissions (e.g., zhes bya ba’i mdo).
For the nominal particle there are 172 pa and 2 pe. We also find the correc-
tions thoeg pa (ITJ 310.177) and thieg pa (PT 3520). For chen po’i the
results are 158 chen, 11 ched, 8 cen, and 1 ced. There are 110 po’i, 30
po’I, 19 po ’i, 7 po ’I, 4 pho’i, 2 pho’I, 1 pho and 3 po. We find 178
mdo, 2 mdo’, 1 ’do, 1 mo, 1 ma, 1 mdo’o, and 1 omission (e.g. dga’o / /
rdzogs so). We also find the correction bdmdo. In two instances we find
142 BRANDON DOTSON

the determinative “this sutra” mdo ’di, but in just as many cases we find this
struck through.
• “Is complete.” We find 114 rdzogs so, 19 rdzogs so+’, 15 rdzogs s+ho, 4
rdzogsso, 1 rdzogso+’, 1 rdzogs+ho, 1 rdzogso’, 1 rdzogs stso, 3 rdzogs,
and 1 skipped (mdo’o).
• “Amitābha. Praise to Amitābha” (^a myi ta phur / na mo ^a myi ta phur).
Between the end of this explicit and the scribe’s and editors’ colophon,
we find in 14 instances an invocation to Amitābha. This is the Tibetan ren-
dering of the Chinese Amituofo, and as with the personal names of scribes
and editors, it is given to variation.22 We find 5 myi, 7 myI, 3 mi, 11 mI, and
1 ma, 1 mo, and 1 mye. There are 23 ta against 3 da, with one corrected to
tia. There are 14 phur against 13 bur. We also find one alternate invocation:
na mo dyi dzang bo sar, a homage to the bodhisattva Ks ̣itigarbha (Dizang
地藏).

From this sample it is possible to make a number of observations. Assuming that

this is representative of these officially sponsored sutras, it provides a fairly good
baseline for the orthographic principles of its time and place, namely the 820s to
840s in Dunhuang. Some results are not particularly surprising, but others help
to establish a relative chronology of orthographic change in Middle Old Tibetan.
To begin, medial ’a are licit. This is evident from the 116 ’da’s as against 70
’das in the word bcom ldan ’da’s. The ma ya btags is normative with i and e
vowels, e.g. myi and mye. The one exception to this comes in the name ^a mi
ta phur, but this can be explained as a special case pertaining to the transcription
of a foreign word. In the sutra’s title given in the explicit, we find only myed and
not a single med. Our sample sentences do not include any words where the da
drag is expected, although we do find the odd over-eager scribe adding these at
ldand and mngond. Had we applied the same methods to the SP, we would have
found a sufficient proportion of pha rold du phyind pa to demonstrate that da
drag are licit, if not expected.23
The sample also demonstrates another common feature of early Tibetan writ-
ing, the alternation of n and d suffixes. This is attested in the ratio of 164 c(h)en :
12 c(h)ed, showing a clear preference for c(h)en. The gi log is also common.
Making a ratio from the appearance of the i vowel in our sample explicits –
mostly, but not exclusively, limited to ergative and genitive particles – we get
272 gi gu : 147 gi log. By comparison, the ratio is 100 : 86 in the north and
south faces of the Sri Pillar (c. 764), and 229 : 287 in the Dbon zhang
Inscription of 823.
Our sample provides fairly ample data on the variation between aspirated and
unaspirated voiceless consonants. Here one must take account of whether or not
the aspiration occurs in an initial position, word-internally, or otherwise. For
example, in the initial position we find a ratio of 167 chen and ched to 9 cen
and ced in the word chen po, and a ratio of 174 tshe : 4 tse. Word-internally,
we have 169 po : 7 pho in c(h)en po/ c(h)ed po. These results are not far
from Classical Tibetan standards, where one expects an aspirated initial and

22 On ^a myi ta pur as the Tibetan rendering of the Chinese Amituofo, see Silk 1993: 17–9.
23 For confirmation, see the transcriptions in Lalou 1961.
 MISSPELLING “BUDDHA” 143

an unaspirated second syllable, e.g. chen po. Theg pa in fact fully accords with
such standards, with 168 theg : 0 teg and 172 pa : 0 pha. If we consider the use
of the sentence final particle in the same context, we find the second syllable
mostly unaspirated: 118 rdzogso/ rdzogs so : 16 rdzogs s+ho/ rdzogs+ho.24
Where there is significant divergence from Classical Tibetan standards is in
the ratio 167 dpag : 11 dphag, where the consonant in question is not in the
onset position. This is almost identical to the ratio of 170 bcom : 11 bchom.
Our sample’s relative alignment of aspiration with Classical Tibetan norms is
further complicated by the ratio of 86 thams cad : 79 thams chad, where the for-
mer became the standard form. Compared with the other ratios, this is the most
anomalous. Precisely this phenomenon has already been discussed, however, by
Nathan Hill: “the use of aspirated spellings word-internally may be credited to a
morphophonemic tendency in the orthography. Since these morphemes were
most frequently spelled as aspirated, the aspirated spellings were generalized,
despite the unaspirated pronunciation word-internally”.25 In other words chad,
as in the phrase chad lhag (“omissions and additions”), was sufficiently frequent
to override the “correct” form thams cad with the “popular” form thams chad.
Our transcribed explicits also measure the fluidity of syllable margins.
We find a ratio of 128 dga’ ’o/ dga’ go/ dga ’o/ dga go : 50 dga’o/ dga’’o/
dgago. The preference for separated syllables is more pronounced in the ratio
of 148 rdzogs so/ rdzogs so+’/ rdzogs s+ho/ rdzogs stso : 7 rdzogso/ rdzogso’
rdzogso+’/ rdzogs+ho. Absent or excessive syllable margins, e.g. dethamsshad
and gsung sa pa, respectively, are rare.
In the case of the ’i(s) form of the genitive and ergative particles, the prefer-
ence for separated syllables is reversed. In our sample we find 26 separated p(h)o
’i or p(h)o ’I : 146 attached p(h)o’i or p(h)o’I. This latter ratio is 0 : 1 in all
imperial-period inscriptions (e.g. 0 : 29 in the north and south faces of the Sri
Pillar and 0 : 94 in the Dbon zhang Inscription). This appears to be part of a
general movement from the mid-eighth century to the late tenth century whereby
attached ’i(s) or ’I(s) gave way to separated ’i(s) or ’I(s). In PT 44, for example,
which dates to either 966 or 978, the ratio of separated to attached ’i(s) or ’I(s) is
37 : 0.26 In a Guiyijun administrative document, PT 1097, the ratio is 26 : 0. Of
course there are outliers, and ratios are less stark in many documents, such as the
mid-to-late ninth-century Guiyijun legal document PT 1081, which, in an admit-
tedly small sample, has a ratio of 6 : 6. Moreover, the trend would reverse itself
when separated ’i(s) and ’i(s) were replaced with yi(s), generally employed
causa metri. Nevertheless, making allowance for such outliers, and understand-
ing that the ratios did not flip all in the same place at the same time, the gradual
separation of ’i(s) from the preceding syllable appears to be one of the few

24 We omit here 19 rdzogs so+’, 1 rdzogso+’, 1 rdzogso’ and 1 rdzogs stso. It also remains
to be confirmed that the distinction between so and s+ho is one of aspiration, particularly
given that such alternation is rare for sibilants. (I am indebted to Nathan Hill for this
observation.) It may be the case that s+ho represents, for example, a lengthened
vowel. On a related matter, Yoshiro Imaeda contends that subscribed ’a, as in rdzogs
so+’, is used to “emphasize the terminal particle”, but that it cannot lengthen the
vowel (Imaeda 2011: 40–1).
25 See Hill 2007: 480; cf. 477, n. 7.
26 On the date, see, most recently, Akagi 2011.
144 BRANDON DOTSON

features one can use fairly reliably to distinguish Middle Old Tibetan from Late
Old Tibetan orthography. Our sample includes one example each of yis and yI
(ITJ 310.196 and ITJ 310.373, respectively) as ergative and genitive particles,
suggesting that this convention may have been just edging its way into
Shazhou in the 820s to 840s.
As for the sandhi of grammatical particles, the data turned up a few surprises.
The first is the use of go as a sentence final particle following dga’. Here one
expects ’o, and indeed ’o was far more prevalent. Additionally, several instances
of dga’ go were corrected to dga’ ’o. This suggests that dga’ go was viewed, at
least by some editors, as incorrect. For many of the Chinese scribes of
Dunhuang, dga’ ’o and dga’ go must have been phonologically equivalent.
We see this also in the spelling mthag dag for mtha’ dag, found in numerous
Ap copies, a point that demonstrates that the sandhi in dga’ go was not the result
of an agreement with the root letter ga. This adds some further support for
Nathan Hill’s conclusions concerning the status of the consonant ’a as a velar
fricative.27 There are several examples in the colophons, ranging from the spel-
lings of personal names to the use of ’is following a suffix, that bear this out.
The forms of the genitive and ergative particles, like the use of attached ver-
sus separated ’i(s), appear to have been in a state of flux. In some texts one finds
a distinct preference for gyi(s) where, following d, b, and s suffixes, one would
expect kyi(s). This is true of the east face of the Sri Pillar (c. 784), the Bsam yas
Inscription (c. 779), and many other texts (e.g. Old Tibetan Annals, Shangshu
Paraphrase, PT 999, PT 1111, PT 1132). On the other hand, the Dbon zhang
Inscription uses kyi(s) where it would be expected by Classical Tibetan stan-
dards. Furthermore, one finds idiosyncratic uses such as in the late Guiyijun
administrative text PT 1082 where only gi(s) is used. In the Ap sample, the erga-
tive following bcom ldan ’da’s should, by the Classical Tibetan standards, be
kyis. The results, however, are 120 gyi(s) : 57 kyi(s).
More decisive is the terminative particle. In the title of the text we invariably
find dpag du, and not the Classical-Tibetan-mandated dpag tu. The ratio of the
former to the latter is 181 : 0. In fact, this is representative of other Middle Old
Tibetan texts, and may apply to Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts more generally.
Du is consistently used where Classical Tibetan standards expect tu in the Dbon
zhang Inscription and in the vast majority of official imperial Tibetan letters, the
Old Tibetan Annals, the Old Tibetan Chronicle, the Rāmāyan ̣a, etc. Occurrences
of tu in Old Tibetan documents are so rare as to be suspect: if they are not mis-
transcriptions or written in error by a sloppy or barely literate scribe, they should
cause one to query the date and provenance of the document in which they are
found. This is not, however, to claim that tu simply did not exist in Middle Old
Tibetan. Indeed, one does find the occasional bona fide tu, as in the case of a few
unequivocal rab tu interspersed with rab du in a pothī-format SP (type 1), PT
1321, r1. Here one must also take into account the graphic variations in the con-
sonant t when it is joined with the u vowel. In most cases its descender is shor-
tened such that tu can resemble du. The obvious way to reduce this from a matter
of opinion to an informed and verifiable statement based on visible evidence is

27 Hill 2005; Hill 2009; and Hill 2011. Cf. Róna-Tas 1992: 699.
 MISSPELLING “BUDDHA” 145

to compare closely any ambiguous du / tu of a given manuscript with unambigu-

ous du / tu as they appear in the same manuscript within words such as dus or
btus. So, while it is indicative, there are exceptions, and the presence of tu can-
not be taken, by itself, as proof that a given manuscript is late (e.g. post-tenth
century).
Two features, the anusvāra and the a’ suffix, are hardly attested. Only 3 of
153 thams c(h)ad/ thams shad use the anusvāra, and we find a similar ratio
of 2 bcoM : 179 bc(h)om. Were one to include the colophon, the ratios would
likely even out, as we find a preponderance of suM zhus. As for the a’ suffix,
we could conceivably find it in our sample as gsungs pa’, myed pa’, and theg
pa’. Only the former two are attested. This follows a more general pattern
observed elsewhere, by which the a’ suffix is more common in nominalized
verbs or in a prepausal position than it is in a noun such as theg pa. Even so,
its occurrence in our sample is rare: we find 172 gsungs pa / gsungs ba against
1 gsungs pa’, and 160 myed pa to 11 myed pa’.

Editing the editors

Scribes used exemplars to copy sutras, and editors used exemplars to correct
them. Both types of exemplars themselves were customarily written by editors,
and it stands to reason that they should be something like a control from which
to judge the sorts of variation that we’ve observed. Fortunately, our study and
that of Nishioka allow us easily to find editors’ copies in order to test this
hypothesis. These are copies written by those who appear as editors in scores
of sutra colophons. This is to be distinguished from the inverse, where a scribe
of many sutras is found as the editor of a few. In the latter case, we assume that
the scribe was promoted to an editor. Our representative sample of transcriptions
from approximately every tenth shelfmark yielded only four editors’ copies. We
transcribed 48 additional editors’ copies from the collections of the British
Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Among these are ten by the
monk (ban de) Ci keng; eight by Shin dar; eight by Dpal gyi sgron ma; and
six by Dpal mchog. There may have been more of these example copies, perhaps
one for each team of scribes and editors. They were evidently included in the
completed sutras when they were finalized and submitted, but their more imme-
diate purpose was practical, and some show signs of wear. PT 3601, an exemplar
written by the editor Shes rab, appears to have been kept by a scribe named Cang
Zhig hing: we find in the colophon the phrase, “Cang ZhIg hing[’s] copy” (cang
zhIg hing dpe’/ legs so/). Small panels are attached at the beginning and at the
end, and the penultimate panel has been patched at the back. The panel follow-
ing the sutra contains a key to a numbering system, perhaps that used by Cang
Zhig hing’s scriptorium in their tallies of how many folia were discarded due to
scribal errors.28 This suggests that it was a personal or scriptorium copy, not
necessarily intended for submission.
Analysing these copies, and comparing the groups of copies attributed to a
single editor, we find no false attributions. That is to say, all of the copies

28 On the numbering systems used in these manuscripts, see Dotson 2015.

146 BRANDON DOTSON

“signed” by Dpal gyi sgron ma, for example, are of the same hand, and the same
principle holds true for all the 52 example copies in this group.29 Apart from
palaeographic features, one notes orthographic practices that are generally con-
sistent across the copies written by a single editor. Ci keng, for example, places
the shad punctuation mark after thams chad, and sometimes after gsung ba la,
and prefers cen po to chen po; Shin dar consistently writes de dag thams cad
instead of de thams cad; Dpal gyi sgron ma prefers dga’ go to dga’ ’o. This lat-
ter point is relevant to the matter of whether or not dga’ go was viewed as an
incorrect form; to the editor Dpal gyi sgron ma it was not.
When taken together as a group, the editors’ copies display an orthography
remarkably similar to that of the representative sample of explicits. This justifies
the grouping together of these explicits with those of the representative sample
taken from approximately every tenth shelfmark. It also demonstrates that the
sort of variation that we have observed, e.g. dga’o versus dga go, is not simply
a product of poorly edited scribes, but represents variations beyond the simple
dichotomy of correct and incorrect forms.

Conclusions
Our results are limited by the size and nature of our sample. As a fairly repre-
sentative sample of the orthography employed by sutra scribes from the 820s
to the 840s in Dunhuang, it flattens out and averages the data, drawing out
the generalized standards of the sutra scribes. At the same time, certain scribes
might consistently use orthographic forms that are in the statistical minority, or
forms that some editors correct. This is true, for example, of Dpal gyi sgron ma’s
use of dga’ go. Such is the nature of how orthographic norms coalesce. In this
case, however, it also reveals an editorial process in which some exemplars to be
copied themselves contained forms that were on the borderline between accept-
able variant and unacceptable error. These are relevant both to the process by
which orthographic norms coalesced, and to the mode of editing applied to cop-
ies of the Ap in the sutra-copying project. The aggregate data, however, point to
the existence of certain clear orthographic standards. These, together with stud-
ies of other Dunhuang documents and early Tibetan writings, help us to estab-
lish some of the prevailing orthographic norms of Middle Old Tibetan.
Our sample explicit contains information about syllable margins, aspiration,
forms of genitive and ergative particles, d/n suffix variation, the use of my

29 One exception is PT 3648. It is a roll of six sheets with twelve columns. The first five
columns are oriented normally, and the next seven at 180 degrees, such that the sutras
start from either end of the scroll and meet in the middle, with the colophon in column
5 immediately preceding the upside-down colophon in panel 6. Both sutras are in the
same hand. The colophon of the first reads “Written by Dam ’ge” (dam ’ge bres), and
the second, upside-down, sutra’s colophon reads “Written by Dang Tse tse” (dang tse
tse gyis bres/ /). The writing is messy, contains numerous errors, and looks as if it
were written very quickly. Nishioka catalogues this under “Dam ’gi (S) 3648?”, indicat-
ing some doubt. My opinion is that it could not have been written by the editor Dam ’gi,
but was rather the product of Dang Tse tse, a scribe who worked so fast and in so sloppy
a manner that, in copying the exemplar Dam ’gi had written for him, he even copied Dam
’gi’s name in the colophon.
 MISSPELLING “BUDDHA” 147

with i and e vowels, and the use of medial ’a, anusvāra, and a’ suffixes. The
sample tells us nothing of several other interesting features, including the semi-
final particle (ste, te, de), the presence or absence of the genitive preceding the
pluralizer rnams, and the forms of the concessive ( yang, kyang, ’ang), co-
ordination (cing, zhing, shing), and quotation particles (ces, zhes). Two features,
’i(s) and tu, were identified as fairly reliable indicators for dating certain orthog-
raphies. Mid-eighth and early ninth-century documents from both central Tibet
and Dunhuang tend to attach the ’i and ’is forms of the genitive and ergative
particles to the preceding syllable. Tenth-century Dunhuang manuscripts, on
the other hand, usually insert a tsheg to mark ’i(s) as a separate syllable. For
the period from the late Tibetan Empire to the early Guiyijun, that is, mid-ninth
to late ninth century, the data tends to be mixed. It remains to be determined
when and where the ’i(s) rejoined the preceding syllable, and when yi(s) – prob-
ably by analogy with ’ang and yang – replaced the stand-alone form ’i(s). Here
one must look to materials from Turfan, Tabo and elsewhere. Clues may also lie
in the Dga’ thang ’bum pa texts from southern Tibet, which, while preferring
attached ’i(s), do include some separated ’i(s) and show no knowledge of the
form yi(s).30
The absence of tu in our sample is striking. This would seem to accord with
Miller’s reading of the norms described in śloka 8 of the Sum cu pa. At the same
time, we find unequivocal tu in copies of imperial-period SP and in a few other
texts. If these are not phonemic misspellings – which is a real possibility, given
the variation between voiced and voiceless consonants, e.g. te thams cad in ITJ
310.1011 – then they constitute evidence that this form was not unknown in
Middle Old Tibetan. The uncertainty in this matter stems from both the graphic
similarity of du and tu, and the alternation between voiced and voiceless conso-
nants. In our sample, gyi(s) and kyi(s) are almost interchangeable following the s
suffix. Morphemic norms seem to have developed in a piecemeal manner, with
the norms governing the morphology of one case particle offering easy analogies
for the standardization of another. Such seems to have happened, for example,
with the innovation of yi(s) by analogy with the concessive particle yang,
which enjoyed widespread use for centuries before yi(s) came into common
use. The same principle stands behind forms such as thams shad, which prob-
ably owes its existence to an analogy with the morphology of the coordination
particle (cing, zhing, shing), where shing follows the s suffix. To consider the
emergence of tu, then, one might look to the use of unaspirated voiceless con-
sonants in other case particles, such as ces, cing, kyi(s), kyang, and te. These are
all attested in Middle Old Tibetan. The relative absence of tu in the corpus of
searchable Old Tibetan documents might be taken to suggest, however, that
these were secondary developments from their voiced counterparts and part of
the same process that would eventually normalize tu. Indications that this pro-
cess was still being settled include the preponderance of forms like ches and
ching, but more especially the use of gyang, de, and gyi(s) where kyang, te,
and kyi(s) are expected.

30 See Pa tshab and Glang ru 2007.

148 BRANDON DOTSON

Obviously, the sample is not a basis from which to write a grammar of

Middle Old Tibetan. It does, however, contribute towards establishing a baseline
for the orthographic standards of literate, Middle Old Tibetan writing. As we
know from the many jottings and patches that adorn the discarded leaves of
Tibetan Dunhuang Śatasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā-sūtra copies, and make these
texts such a comparatively rich trove for the social and cultural history of the
sutra-copying project, the scribes who wrote the sutras were the very same
scribes who wrote official letters and contracts. Their flights of fancy include
dhāran ̣ī, Mahāyoga tantra, proverbs and verses from the Rāmāyan ̣a. The conclu-
sions about their orthographic norms, therefore, are not to be cordoned off and
held as relevant only to sutras. The study of the orthography that governed their
writing, in addition to the palaeographic study of scribal hands, aids us in dis-
tinguishing between the production of such scribes and the work of those
who came later.

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