Tai Chung-pui, Zaytsev V. Tibetan Buddhism practice of the great seal (mahāmudrā) as recorded in Tangut fragments with Tibetan phonetic glosses: an annotated sentence-based reading of Tang. 1075/Fr. 6(11) // Тангутская и китайская филология. К юбилею М. В. Софронова. Москва: Институт востоковедения РАН, 2024. P. 363–395. (Учёные записки Отдела Китая ИВ РАН; Вып. 47). ISBN 978-5-907846-10-4.
This paper provides an extensive annotated sentence-based reading of Fr. 6(11), a Tangut fragment with Tibetan phonetic gloss from the set of fragments held under the pressmark Tang. 1075 in the Tangut Collection of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg. It first reports the recently re-discovered character-for-character decipherment of the fragments conducted by the prominent Russian Orientalist and Tangutologist Nikolai (Nicolas) Aleksandrovich Nevsky (1892–1937) in the late 1920s and 1930s. Then an interlinear gloss and sentencebased translation of the Tangut text is provided based on the previous character-for-character decipherments. All missing Tangut characters in the leftmost line are reconstructed. A detailed reading of the Tangut text in this fragment reveals the teaching of mahāmudrā, or the Tibetan Buddhism practice of the great seal. It echoes the teaching of the Six Yogas of Nāropa in other fragments under pressmark Tang. 1075. Because the Six Yogas of Nāropa and the great seal are the two pillars of the Kagyu School, it should be quite certain that the fragments from Tang. 1075 were written to instruct the Kagyu teaching. It should be possible to sequentially trace the date and the background of the writers of these fragments based on the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism during the Tangut era.
On October 2, 2023, the Department of Far Eastern Studies, IOM RAS, will hold the “Ideology of Traditional China” Conference dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the outstanding Russian Sinologist Alexander S. Martynov (1933–2013).
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