306 karénina kollmar-paulenz
Tibetan court of the Yar-lung dynasty and its most important affairs
of state. Another text, the so-called Dunhuang Chronicle, consists of the
same contents as the Dunhuang Annals, but tells them in a more liter-
ary fashion. It also contains legends about the mythical origins of the
Tibetans. The Dunhuang documents unwittingly and unintentionally
tell us about the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet far more than
any later pious distortions. Their accounts are not modelled after a
Buddhist teleological scheme, but rather narrate the encounter of the
Tibetans with Buddhism as one of the many events during that time
which bore enough signi cance to be told and written down. The
advent of Buddhism into Tibet is not considered of prime importance
to the fate of the Tibetan empire and its people, on the contrary:
Buddhism is sparsely mentioned, and sometimes not at all, in these
texts. The Dunhuang documents are thus of primary importance to
the historian of religion, because they counterbalance the Buddhist
ideological view of this period which is dominant in nearly all of the
later literary sources.
Yet another literary genre, which at rst sight does not have anything
at all to do with the Buddhist expansion in Tibet, must be considered
here. I refer to the sGra-sbyor-bam-po-gnyis-pa, the commentary to the
bilingual glossary Mahvyutpatti. In the characterisation of Cristina
Scherrer-Schaub it was at the same time “a vademecum destined for trans-
lators, a public act, and a richly argued lexicographical commentary”.^5
New fragments of the text have only recently come to light in Tabo
in Western Tibet. The Mahvyutpatti itself also proves important as a
source which helps us determine the extent of the establishment of the
Buddhist institution as an “integral part of the Tibetan empire.”^6
3.2. The phyi-dar GroupThe overwhelming majority of the Tibetan literature dates from the
phyi-dar, the “later spread [of the dharma]”. Among the bulk of literature
to be considered here only very few texts were actually written in the rst
two centuries of the phyi-dar, the tenth and eleventh centuries. Impor-
tant for our topic is the dBa’-bzhed, the royal chronicle dealing with the
introduction of Buddhism in Tibet. This chronicle, probably compiled
in the tenth century, deals extensively with the major events which led
(^5) Scherrer-Schaub 2002, p. 278.
(^6) Scherrer-Schaub 2002, p. 264.