Volume 28 of 'Studies in Manuscript Cultures' publishedBon and Naxi Manuscripts

13 February 2023

Photo: De Gruyter

The first primarily object-based study on the cultural history and technology of books from the Tibetan Bon and Naxi Dongba traditions discusses the relationship between text and image, writing materials, and the historical and archaeological context of the manuscripts’ places of origin.

The Bon literary corpus comprises several thousand volumes on a vast array of topics. Despite enormous scientific progress in Bon studies during the last decades and a significant increase of general interest in Bon religion itself, the greater part of Bon practice, history, and literature is still unknown to the world. Bon and Naxi Manuscripts, the most recent volume of Studies in Manuscript Cultures, offers a wealth of new insights into largely unknown cultural developments on the Tibetan Plateau and their connections to other traditions, and helps to consolidate this emerging field of study.

The term ‘Bon’ refers to three different things: first, the religion that prevailed in Tibet before the introduction of Buddhism in the seventh century (about which very little is known); secondly, a wide range of cults across Tibet and the Himalayan middle hills that often feature spirit mediums; and finally, the systematised religion that developed in tandem with Tibetan Buddhism and includes a monastic tradition. The contributions to the present volume are among the first in a series of case studies on both the collections and the individual artefacts of the Bon tradition, studied from the perspective of history, codicology, and preservation. They closely integrate the distinctive aspects of manuscripts – as artefacts that are the product of specific technologies and skills, as platforms for content, and as essential components of ritual performance – into research on Bon and Naxi manuscripts.

The volume, which is edited by Agnieszka Helman-Ważny and Charles Ramble, is the result of five workshops at CSMC between 2016 and 2022. The first two workshops, entitled ‘Bonpo Manuscript Culture: Towards a Definition of an Emerging Field (parts 1 and 2)’, organised in 2016 and 2017, were dedicated to existing Bon manuscript collections (some of the most important of which have been discovered only recently), and oriented to the Bon tradition itself, their possible interconnections with Naxi culture, as well as surveys of collections from all around the world. In 2018, the third workshop, entitled ‘Bon Manuscripts in Context’, adopted a cross-disciplinary approach to develop a methodology to identify possible tools to formulate a definition of ‘Bon manuscript culture’. The fourth workshop, held in 2019, entitled ‘Manuscripts, Rituals, and Magic in the Bon Religion’, explored connections between manuscripts, their function, their form in the context of the Bon religion and ritual performance, and more generally the material forms encapsulating this entire range of features. Finally, the workshop ‘The Elusive Connection: Manuscripts and Rituals of the Bon and Naxi Traditions’ (2022) focused specifically on the connection between Bon and Naxi manuscripts.  

Like all previous volumes in the series, Bon and Naxi Manuscripts is available as open access; all contributions can be downloaded from the publisher’s website.