The Culture of the Book in Tibet by Schaeffer Kurtis;

Author:Schaeffer, Kurtis;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism/Books and Reading
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

6 THE COST OF A PRICELESS BOOK

The studies undertaken here are not primarily a history of the Tibetan book in its material existence. Rather, they constitute a history of people talking about books, of the book as a significant object through which to describe, prescribe, and contest culture. Here Polané's golden Kangyur is as much a rhetorical tool employed by his biographer as it is a finely crafted object. This concluding chapter renders this discussion more explicit by considering the book as a symbolic object, first looking at a single work of history, the Blue Annals, for what it may reveal about the range of discourse about books. With several hundred references to books, their materials, and the practices associated with them scattered throughout its relentless listings of Buddhist saints, scholars, teachings, and traditions in early Tibet, the Blue Annals is ideally suited to such thematic mining. The chapter then moves to more vivid and detailed discussions that treat the book as an object at once physical, social, and symbolic. Finally, it returns to the central characters of the previous chapter, Situ and Shuchen, the editors of eighteenth-century Degé, to ask what value the canons may have had for both their patrons and themselves. In so doing, I hope to sketch a plausible vision of the social and cultural landscape upon which the traditions of textual scholarship explored in previous chapters flourished.

Works such as Gö Lotsawa's Blue Annals, a veritable microcosm of Buddhist culture through the late fifteenth century, offer a wider perspective on the culture of the book in Tibet. The book is the crafted object most frequently mentioned in the Blue Annals, not surprising after one considers the vast outpouring of human and material resources in the production of books in the centuries before and up to Gö Lotsawa's time. One example from another source will help us imagine the possible context of its evidence. During the production of a manuscript Tengyur at Shalu monastery in 1362, thirteen types of skilled craftsmen and scholars were employed, including directors, scribal managers, proofreaders, chief scribes, papermakers, engravers, goldsmiths who worked on the book covers, page numberers, collators, book-strap makers, and finally blacksmiths who made the buckles for the straps.1 Wood, fiber, paper, ink, and metal were utilized to produce finely crafted volumes, all under strict supervision of a management team.2 This project followed upon four decades of canonical production in which—estimated conservatively solely from the evidence of the Blue Annals—several thousand volumes and over one million pages were produced at a handful of institutions in central Tibet. By the early fifteenth century, on the eve of Gö Lotsawa's history, the leaders of nearby Gyantsé alone sponsored the production of hundreds of canonical volumes every single year.

This chapter focuses on only two of many possible aspects of book culture that are suggested by a reading of the Blue Annals: the book as an object of offering and exchange—in other words, as a part of economic life; and the book as a symbolic object, at once depending on and extending beyond its material aspects.

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