All illustrations from volumes other than Ka, Ga and A are courtesy of the British Library. Illustrations from Ka are courtesy of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The Bodleian Library has agreed access to these miniatures from Ka following registration (register from the contents page or from a link under each controlled image). Images from the first folio of Ga and A are courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum. All other images from Ga and A are courtesy of the British Library. The Victoria and Albert Museum has agreed access to these miniatures from Ga and A following registration (register from the contents page or from a link under each controlled image). We appreciate the cooperation of these institutions.
All textual input of whatever sort was done in the manner of an exhaustively detailed diplomatic transcription. This is a labour-intensive procedure that demands a high level of skill and concentration, and has not generally been done elsewhere in the cataloguing of Tibetan xylographs and manuscripts. Our rationale for this unusual procedure is twofold:
(a) Our first rationale for a fully detailed diplomatic transcription in large part flows from the new conditions arising from the use of digital devices as well as our anticipation of the next logical stage in rNying ma’i rgyud ’bum studies (i.e. the making of detailed text-critical studies). The portions of the text that we have entered - text titles, homages, opening phrases, chapter titles, colophons and postscripts etc. - collectively amount to a substantial proportion of the entire textual content of the manuscript. This is because, typically, rNying ma’i rgyud ’bum texts have very short chapters, but often with rather long titles. Since we were to do such a vast data entry in any case, we thought it useful to enter all this data according to the strictest possible criteria of diplomatic transcription, including all punctuation, abbreviations, etc., (more or less following the model of Harrison 's landmark exhaustive edition of the Druma-kinnara-rāja-paripṛcchā-sūtra of 1992, or Mayer 1996 , which was influenced by the former). The outcome is that a scholar wishing to create a critical edition of a rNying ma’i rgyud ’bum text using its witness from Rig 'dzin Tshe dbang nor bu, will find that a substantial part of the laborious task of collating this manuscript has already been done for them, and moreover that the transcription is made easily available for importation into their own computers in a variety of standard digital forms. If one thinks in terms of critically editing the entire rNying ma’i rgyud ’bum, this probably amounts to a time-saving of around 18-20 month's work. If one thinks in terms of the collation of a single or maybe two major texts, it still represents the saving of many days or weeks of laborious work. This kind of facilitation is particularly important right now because currently a most urgent desideratum in rNying ma’i rgyud ’bum studies is to make stemmatic studies which reveal the relationships between the texts of the various different surviving editions from internal evidence - so far, only one such stemmatic analysis has ever been done, and more are urgently needed, to complete the picture revealed by the external evidence arising from basic comparative cataloguing.
(b) Secondly, it is a fact that scribal errors are extremely frequent in all Tibetan canonical corpora. But we found in using other catalogues that some scholars have failed to address this issue consistently. Trying to save time in their transcription, they tend to silently emend their text in some instances but not in others, more or less as they feel able at the time - resulting in an additional level of confusion, since hasty conjectures of this sort can easily be erroneous, while the silent nature of their emendation might further mislead the reader. We felt a rigorous and exact diplomatic transcription with no silent emendations allows a much more precise appraisal of the text, especially when it can be compared with other editions which might (significantly) reproduce exactly the same scribal errors as our edition. In other words, we have envisaged our catalogue as a fully descriptive inventory useful also for finely detailed comparative purposes, and not merely as a quick and easy tool for text location (although it completely performs that function also).