Abstract
The Tibetan scenario is murkier and less certain than the Chinese, so that my talks probably should be as much oriented towards problematising existing scholarship as making any strong positive assertions of my own. Until now, most Tibetologists (but with some exceptions such as Matthew Kapstein, Per Kvaerne, Dan Martin, and myself) have taken the 14th century works of O rgyan gling pa (1323-c.1360) as the main sources for understanding the early treasure tradition. I will discuss how O rgyan gling pa does indeed incorporate demonstrably old materials into his works. But I will also also discuss how he changes the early texts to suit his contemporary agendas. Then I will tentatively examine O rgyan gling pa’s possible relation to contemporaneous Mongol and Chinese ideas of treasure, a question first posed by Matthew Kapstein, inspired in part by his reading of Anna Seidel.
Publication
Mayer, Robert, 2019. “Rethinking Treasure (part one)”, in Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, no. 52, Octobre 2019, pp. 119-184. (http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/ret/pdf/ret_52_05...)
