Abstract
In his book Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece (Harvard University Press, 2012), as also in his lecture to this Treasure Seminar last Hilary Term, the anthropologist Charles Stewart has shown how narratives of supernaturally-guarded treasure troves, both sacred and mundane, have existed across numerous cultures and across widely separated historical periods. In our forthcoming work, Anna Sehnalova and I will attempt to explore how initially quite separate and independent Indian and Tibetan Treasure traditions seem to have come together in early post-Imperial Tibet, to gradually emerge as the particular tradition that we now know as gter ma. In this lecture, I will introduce some so far little explored Indian contributors to the gter ma tradition, in the form of passages on the recovery of Treasure (nidhi, gter) contained in official Imperial-period Tibetan translations of Indian Kriyātantras. Some of these are detailed, for example, the Vidyottamatantra contains a single Treasure recovery instruction that is over twenty pages long, while others still survive in Sanskrit, enabling an accurate reconstruction of the Indian terminology, and thus an assessment of the significations of the indigenous terms chosen by Tibetans to translate them.
Finally, I will look at Dunhuang texts and other early sources to seek hints at how the newly-translated Indian Buddhist treasure traditions were received in Tibet, and how they were integrated with the indigenous Tibetan treasure traditions, to gradually merge together as the gter ma tradition that we are so familiar with today.
Publication
Mayer, Robert, 2022. “Indian nidhi, Tibetan gter ma, Guru Chos dbang, and a Kriyātantra on Treasure Doors: Rethinking Treasure (part two)”, Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, no. 64, Juiller 2022, pp. 368-446 (http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/ret/pdf/ret_64_16...)
