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| Hugh Richardson |
Every scholar
who has studied early Tibetan inscriptions will know of the journal articles which H.E. Richardson wrote on inscriptions, from the first published in 1949 to the
last in 1995. The 1949 first article (on inscriptions at Skar cung, Bsam yas and Mtshur phu) was
published while Richardson was in Tibet; all subsequent articles were published
after he had left in 1950. Thus, without access to the actual stones at the
time of the later articles, apart from other authors’ publications on the
subject he must have relied on his collection of notes, photographs, copying of
inscriptions, and estampages.
He also relied on a transcription made for him of the inscription at Rkong po, because he
never did visit that site.
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Rkong po inscription copy commissioned by
Dudjom Rinpoche in 1950
and sent to Hugh E. Richardson (left-click to enlarge) |
In addition, it must be obvious to any reader of Richardson’s articles that
from 1959 onward in his articles about stelae inscriptions he referred often to a series of photographs of a manuscript
text. The photographs and negatives of the manuscript had been given to him by Rai
Bahadur T.D. Densapa (also known as Burmiok Athing, 1902-1988), of
Gangtok.
Densapa
had informed Richardson, in a letter sent from Gangtok to St Andrews (Scotland),
that several of the notes on the original manuscript appeared ("
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| (left-click to enlarge) |
The manuscript apparently recorded the inscriptions of 5 stelae in the Central Tibet region, and from internal evidence the text
may be an original record made in the 15th century, with possibly 18th-century
additions and notes. Several times Richardson expressed in articles the
intention to publish the photographs of the manuscript, but he never did so.
Indeed, the photographs he had in St Andrews seemed to have disappeared, and the
original manuscript in Gangtok has not surfaced.
In 2007, I was a student at Harvard. Required to write an
essay on a Tibetan inscription, I chose the 'Phyong rgyas bridge-head inscription as my subject. Very few words of the original inscription in
situ remain legible, so Richardson’s ‘record’ of the inscription relied almost
entirely on the Densapa manuscript photographic record. Thus the essay necessarily had to be based on
information on the inscription in Richardson’s 1964 article and 1985 book, rather than on the photographs themselves.
With the essay
completed, and having returned to the UK, I searched through the Richardson Papers archive at Bodleian for any
negatives or photographs of the manuscript, but to no avail. Likewise,
enquiries and letters to the Pitt-Rivers Museum (repository of Richardson’s
photographs), the British Museum, the British Library and Richardson’s
will-executors in St Andrews also drew a blank: no evidence of the negatives.
In 2010, as the librarian for the Tibetan collection at the Bodleian, I started the process of attempting to clear up several boxes of
books in a back room at the top of New Bodleian Library.
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| Old Bodleian, Oxford, 2011 |
Some of Richardson’s
books which had yet to be catalogued were packed in the boxes. Amongst the books I came across a folder of negatives with the Das Studio (Darjeeling) logo
printed on it, along with several positive prints of a manuscript text, marked
with pagination and notes in Richardson’s handwriting.
I immediately felt
that this find might be the ‘missing’ negatives. It was indeed.
The 'prints' of the text photographs are now presented on Digital Bodleian website, here.
* * * * *
This find at Bodleian Library was first presented in October 2011, at the University of Vienna conference Epigraphic Evidence in the Pre-modern Buddhist World, jointly by Charles Manson (on the find itself) and Dr Nathan Hill (commenting on some features of the manuscript).
* * * * *
The Densapa manuscript consists of
a
1-folio copy of the Rkong po inscription - ie 'text X' (Richardson's labelling)
a
2-folios copy of the Skar cung inscription - text Y
a 4-folio copy of (in corresponding order) - text Z:
Khri Lde srong
brtsan tomb pillar,
'Phyong rgyas
bridge pillar,
Lhasa Treaty
pillar East,
Lhasa Treaty pillar West.
The dbu med of the manuscript has been transliterated in
accordance with the Old Tibetan Documents
Online (OTDO) system, as presented in Old
Tibetan Inscriptions (Iwao et al.
2009: xvii-xix), which is basically Wylie, but with ‘v’ used rather than ‘w’, capital ‘I’ used for reversed gi gu. However, here the Extended Wylie convention is used for a-chung lengthening of the voewl 'u' (eg bU, bUn ).
The
manuscript transliterations for each inscription is presented below in correlation with the Old Tibetan Inscriptions
transliterations, line by line. However, where bsdus yig abbreviation letters or signs occur in the manuscript,
capitals are used (e.g. GS for the -gs
sign, M for the -m supralinear sign,
or THAMS CAD as expansion of the ‘compressed’ word thaMd, or SANGS RGYAS
for sargyas).
Supralinear and sublinear
additions are indicated in italics in
footnotes. In the manuscript transcription of the Rkong po inscription, text X,
all the supralinear and sublinear additions and corrections were in
red ink (according to Densapa’s copyist, see MS. Or. Richardson 38, folio 1.
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| (left-click to enlarge) |
It is notable that the Densapa copyist of the manuscript's version of the Rkong po inscription has also added some red corrections which are not featured in the original manuscript (eg btsan to brtsan, ri to rI for lines 1 and 2 of the Rkong po inscription transcription). It is not know whether the additions for texts Y and Z were in red ink.
In the transliterations linked to below, OTI = Old Tibetan Inscriptions (Iwao et al. 2009), the square
brackets containing 3 numbers refer to the line reference of the relevant
inscription, e.g. [002] for line 2, [027] for
line 27. The OTI line references are inserted in the manuscript transliteration
in order to help with reading the correlations.
Thanks due to Dr Lewis Doney for
checking the transliterations and for his useful comments.
The transcriptions of the manuscript versions of the stelae inscriptions are linked here:
