Some people had Tibetan personal names and Chinese surnames, and vice versa. By the end of the Tibetan empire the distinction between “Chinese elites” and “Tibetan expatriates” had become blurred. Just the fact that it was a multilingual community means that we don’t known whether the person who wrote, or commissioned a Tibetan Buddhist manuscript was from a Tibetan background rather than Chinese, Turkic, Khotanese, and so on. With the Dunhuang manuscripts, there are frustratingly few clues. As I say in the book, when we are looking at a manuscript or a collection of manuscripts, we ought to be thinking about the humans who created them and put them to use.

Sam van Schaik: That’s a very interesting question, which involves two issues: first, who was using the manuscripts and practicing Chan in the Tibetan language, and secondly, what’s the relationship between the dates of the manuscripts and the texts they contain. Based on the genres of these texts-group initiation rituals, worldly rituals, recitation and meditation practices, notes and aids, amulets and talismans, and so on-do we have any certainty about whether these were Chinese Buddhist elites in the last days of a Tibetan governorship, Tibetan expatriates stationed in Dunhuang waiting to return home, or both? As you noted, this is despite the fact that the date of their production is around the end of the Tibetan occupation in Dunhuang. He recently published a new book, The Spirit of Zen (2018), with Yale Books.īuddhistdoor Global: The Tibetan Zen practices described in the Dunhuang manuscripts you translated allude to a period of early proto-Chan (500–600 CE) through lineage accounts and records of teachings.

In this interview, van Schaik discusses a subject that he pioneered in one of his seminal books, Tibetan Zen: Rediscovering a Lost Tradition (2015), which is groundbreaking in its examination of texts spanning a period of Chan (Zen) presence and influence at the oasis kingdom of Dunhuang during the imperial Tibetan period. His PhD (2000) focused on Jigme Lingpa’s Dzogchen texts, and he has taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He is presently head of the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library, and is also well known for his work with the International Dunhuang Project, also based at the British Library. From īuddhistdoor Global recently caught up with Sam van Schaik, an eminent scholar of Buddhist history, the Silk Road, and Tibetan Buddhism. Mogao Caves 16–17, with 17 being the famous Library Cave where Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts were discovered in 1907.

The lost caves of tibet