During our visit to the caves at Piyang, we were shown the "library" (which is housed in the red building pictured above) by the caretaker. According to him, a certain old monk went around to all the caves and ruins at Piyang and collected all the texts he could find (including ripped pieces of texts (pictured below). Many of these texts are extremely old (dating back to before the 12th century) and were written in various scripts and on different coloured paper and with different types of ink. One of the lecturers on the seminar gave us some instructions on how to date the texts - for instance by looking at the orthography, cataloguing systems for canonical texts and binding holes. Unfortunately, we weren't permitted to stay for long enough to read any!
3 comments:
Are Tibetans working on these texts, or are the Chinese involved? Any idea when & if they'll be in English?
Nobody is working on those texts. They're simply being stored in bundles...who knows when and if they'll ever be translated.
ok so where is Piyang located? i cant find it... how did you make it out to western tibet? i heard its very expensive. please explain alllll! haha
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