More Than We Imagined: Early Zhijé Histories

 

I know this must look like a shallow dip into deep and cloudy waters. Perhaps it is just that. I woke up one morning with an odd idea. I thought of constructing a list that would form the basis for a small library of Zhijé lineage histories prior to around 1300 CE. Given that time restraint, I eventually narrowed in on about eight items. In line with the larger Tibetan Histories bibliography, they were placed in chronological order by date of composition.* I have to say, it was a lot of work. I began to wonder why put all that effort into making a list not guaranteed to be useful or inspiring to all that many of us on our blue planet? 

Oh, well. There won't be any grand conclusions about the historical significance of these history books in today's blog. But yes, I do plan to use them as a basis for another one about Padampa's birthplace and childhood, just not quite yet. It shouldn't be too surprising if looking at the earliest histories might make us reconsider what the later ones have been telling us. But more on that later, since my ideas are still in the testing phase.**

(*I suppose my initial impulse came out of a need to integrate them into Tibetan Histories in a future edition. The 2020 expanded 2nd edition is here for free download. **Oh, and not to forget, I need to write down why I now believe the date of Padampa's death must be moved back by 12 years, from the 1117 you see everywhere to 1105 CE. Not as trivial a move as it may seem.)

To be short and concise, I will refer to the list and the histories listed in it as a single entity with capitals: "The Library."

Before getting too serious about the histories in The Library, a very rapid review with the help of a slide I've shown before. It outlines the Middle and Later Lineages that descended from Padampa. 

For present purposes we can limit ourselves to the three major Middle Transmissions, leaving aside the three minor ones. And we can ignore all but the Kunga lineage of the Later Transmission. That means just four transmissions — the Ma, So, Kam and Kunga — make up the subject matter of The Library in its entirely. 

So, here you see the first four in The Library made up of eight items. A few words about each one and our time is over.

—Z1—

I justify putting the women's history, a collective biography of Padampa's woman disciples, as number one simply because it is the first discrete titled historical text that appears in the entire Zhijé corpus known to me. Indeed it is to be counted among the dozen earliest Phyi-dar (roughly post-1000 CE) Tibetan history-genre texts we know of. It exists in a Matho Monastery fragment (more on Matho in a minute) scribed before 1200. It comes down to us in basically two versions, one that combines precepts with biographical information, and another with biographies only. Our oldest datable textual witness, the fragment in Matho, belongs to the former group, combining biographical information with precepts.

Here I display before your eyes the Matho fragment without saying more for now, just in order to impress on you the remarkable fact that we do have a pre-1200 manuscript. For more, I can send you back to a recent blog on the subject.*

(*See “Women Disciples of Padampa: Very Early Ladakhi Zhijé Fragments from Matho,” June 06, 2024.)

—Z2—

Now for no. 2. Astounding but true, also found nested among the Matho fragments is a fairly complete untitled history of the Middle Transmission of the Kam (སྐམ་) lineage. Unlike most of the Matho fragments that are in truth fragments, this one is in a still-intact booklet format, just that both beginning and end are missing.

—Z3 & Z4— 

I will say little about 3 and 4 in my list. No. 3 is arguably only the longer of many equally early historical introductions in the Zhijé Collection (so perhaps it shouldn't be included at all), while no. 4 is the best known of the early Zhijé histories as its content is largely reproduced in the Blue Annals, long available in English translation.

—Z5—

So I will move ahead to my number 5, the set of Middle Zhijé histories preserved in eastern Bhutan at Drametsé Monastery. Although there are three distinct and quite short texts, I have bunched them all together under the same number in The Library, distinguishing them by adding letters a, b and c if needed.

The rough date of composition of all three of these small Middle Lineage histories is surely early 13th century, perhaps even the first quarter of the 13th century. I have written a blog essay about the Ma (རྨ་) lineage history, so will not discuss its provenance and authorship again here.*

(*Middle Zhijé in Four Matho Fragments, posted July 27, 2025.)

 

 

I will just say I think it possible the Drametsé manuscript as a whole was directly inscribed in the pre- or early-Mongol era, and is not a somewhat later copy. It is difficult at this point to be sure.

It looks like this in the photographs taken at Drametsé Monastery by the team of Karma Phuntsok under the British Library sponsored Endangered Archives Project (try this link).

—Z6—

No. 6 in The Library is something quite unknown to Tibetology that suddenly came to my attention during the winter months of 2024 when I had the good fortune to be enabled to spend some winter weeks in Rome looking at the Tucci Tibetan collection in the reading room of the IsIAO.*

Just two days before my departure, Elena de Rossi Filibeck gave me an offprint of an article she had published. There, in a footnote on its first page, was a title I immediately recognized as a work of Padampa. For an entire day I thought I ‘discovered’ it, but this turned out to be untrue, as Elena had already done a complete catalog on this manuscript set that she then freely and generously shared with me. This manuscript set, too, has been subject of a Tibetologic blog.** 

(*If you wish to explore the Giuseppe Tucci collection, your constant companion will be Elena de Rossi Filibeck, Catalogue of the Tucci Tibetan Fund in the Library of IsIAO, in 2 volumes. The fresh new book by Michela Clemente promises to answer the questions we have about how Tucci got his books: In Search for the Provenance of the Books of the Tucci Tibetan Collection. **See “Padampa in the Vatican?” March 22, 2024.) 

 

—Z7—

Just briefly, I would like to say that the Nyedowa history, no. 7, is of a respectable length, and written by an author of not just this, but two other intriguing histories, one on the history of medicine,* and the other on the Kālacakra.

(*On Nyedowas's medicine history, see this Tibetologic blog. The study

 by Brambilla on his Kālacakra history is not yet published.)

—Z8—

I suppose the biographies authored by Chu-sgom-pa ought to be dated to around 1300 with question mark. The composer has no known dates and a problematic identity; I doubt he has to do with the 'Chus-pa sub-lineage that anyway preceded Zhigpo. This is brief and contains only minimal sketches on Padampa and so on, so I leave it aside for the time being.

I continued the listing with more of the still not well enough known or undatable materials. Our set of eight isn't set in stone. I even went on to list some newly available histories that were composed after 1300. I will not describe any of these other texts today. I imagine you may find more interesting some historical reflections that this early body of historical literature brings to the fore. Next time, my friends, next time.

Postscripts

As you may have noticed in the opening slide, this is part of a presentation, since revised, meant for the International Association of Tibetan Studies meeting scheduled to take place in Kathmandu in late August 2026. Due to inter- and intra-miscommunications of Beijing and Kathmandu there was an episode of political ball fumbling resulting in the in-person conference getting cancelled and moved onto Zoom. The local Nepalese press and, later on, the international stories about the cancellation were in large part off the mark and were indeed part of the problem. Beijing did not demand the conference be cancelled. She was planning how best to make use of it to mainstream her false state narrative about Tibet and his history. For a discussion of all this, one that I believe to be largely correct, see Robbie Barnett's essay: "Cross-border Interference or Garbled Messaging: China, Nepal, and the Cancellation of the World's Largest Tibetan Studies Conference." Look here for it.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I intend to put up the full texts of The Library eventually. It nears completion, and when it is in shape to share I will link to it here. With OCR busy doing so much to make Tibetan texts searchable in some degree, it is still just a fact that so many pre-Mongol-era Tibetan works, particularly those we now have in cursive manuscripts, are not yet searchable. That means transcribing them is something Human Skilled Intelligence* is needed to do, either from scratch or by skillfully correcting the substandard job OCR makes of it. Besides, good transcriptions can then be put to use as "training data" so in the future the not-so-super intelligence we will continue to understand as being artificial can possibly get a little better at doing it. Even with all our credible doubts, might the accumulation of knowledge bring something beneficial to living sentient beings? Is that naive?

(*I didn't invent the HSI concept, but I am not sure I should advertise for it by giving out links until I know more about it. It appears to be free, but there is the ever present danger of monetization. Everywhere, that is, except here in Tibeto-logic blog with its general rule that nothing unfree will be put on offer!)

A Great List of Online Resources for Tibetan Studies

Sunbird Sipping Nectar

Somehow it escaped my attention until just today, but a fantastic listing of online resources for Tibetan Studies has been there at the University of Virginia’s Tibetan and Himalayan Library for as long as two years now. Why did no one tell me? Just go there and scroll down through the many attractions the web has to offer, nicely divided into types. That means if you are looking for online dictionaries, you get a discreet list of them with tappable links to get to the one of your choice in the twinkling of an eye, likewise with sites that offer downloadable PDFs and OCRable texts.

To get there go here:  https://thlib.org/terms/reference-resources/#/

In case the link fails you, try a websearch for “Key Tibetan Reference Resources.” I must warn you ahead of time, it may trigger your manic-depressive mood swings, at first feeling overwhelmed by how much is out there that you will never be able to see or download or understand... followed by a sense of elation about how much is out there and so quickly available to yourself and to others. Me? I find myself in between, yet I was thrilled to see, for instance, that the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives has made their rare manuscripts available online (to find it go to that link I just gave you and look for it for yourself).*

It is embarrassing to admit, but the listing at Tibetan and Himalayan Library is so much better arranged, so much more comprehensive, and so much more up-to-date than what you see in my sidebar, I’m thinking about how I might give most of it a toss out the window. On second thought, dead links are a sad fact of the internet and you find their tombstones everywhere, so why not let things be? What do you think? Either way it looks like work. 

(*One thing I observed while inspecting the THLib listing is just how few blogs specifically about Tibet are out there.**  Why don’t you start one up? I heard they are about to become cool again.)

[**But, well, they haven’t listed Tibetan-written or Tibetan-language blogs for some reason. ཁབ་བརྡ་, to give just one example, would have been a very obvious one to include. I would have left out all those travel blogs, too, just as they did.]

While I’m making referrals I thought I would point you toward Alexander A. Smith’s new video series on Tibetan history.  

If the video doesn’t immediately pop up on your screen, try this link to the channel named Armchair Academics. Especially since YouTube offerings overall have become so dreadful in recent months, it is encouraging to see things of real education value for a change.

• If you have more suggestions to make, please let us know in the comments. I also thought about the Starr Library at Columbia University. It has particularly rich listings of Tibetan studies resources of various kinds. For some reason it is not findable in the listing of listings in THLib, so I think it should be added. It is through it that you get access to the Tibet Mirror newspaper database, as well as the papers of Lama Anagarika Govinda, to mention two of its superbly fascinating offerings.

Disclaimer: All the creators of the resources mentioned in this blog are good friends, it is true, but they never asked me to praise or criticize them, let alone make links to their digital realms, and they don’t receive monetary benefits from this any more than I do. Well, maybe a little more, I have no idea, really. I’ll ask them.

Yunnan’s Old Tibetan Inscription

Photo taken by myself a few years back

This is a tomb inscription for a political figure of importance in 8th-century Yunnan-Tibet relations. I won’t even try to tack it up against a historical backdrop, you can attempt this for yourself by consulting the literature listed later on.* For now I just supply a very rough transcription only, not an exact one, followed by one meant to be more precisely scientific. You will want to consult the original rubbings, or photos in any case. Finally, an attempt at accurate English-ization.

(*What you see are my own photos taken in 2016 at the museum in Lijiang, with the display glass creating photographic challenges. Just to give an idea of distances, by today’s roads Lhasa and Lijiang are over 1700 kilometers apart. It’s like driving from Frankfort to Lisbon. But where the European would mean 22 hours of driving, the Tibetan stretch of highway would take at least 32.) 

Takata believes the inscription must predate 788 CE, placing it among the earliest datable stone inscriptions in Tibetan. The translation is redone here with reference to the translation in his essay, p. 162. I have to point out that the differences are not likely to seem very meaningful. For the OTDO transcription of the text, look here. I think if I’ve brought more attention to the existence of this pivotal piece of history carved in stone, it will be enough to justify this blogging attempt.

As for its provenance, the museum label tells us it was excavated at “Gezi village in Shigu township of Lijiang in March 1992.” The out-of-this-world artwork is worthy of its own close study, I would agree, but I choose to stick to the text. Here is my smoothed-out version of the Tibetan-language inscription in normal Wylie followed by the Tibetan script:

Click to enlarge

mtsho rum long la dag thog ma / rgya 'bangs las rgya rje gtan gyi rjer myi rung nas // btsan po lha sras la glo ba nye ste // blon skyes bzang la / phyag 'tshal nas pho tshed zang mang ni / gser chen pho stsald // long la dag gtsang cen stsald pa las lo dgu bcu lon de gum ba'i mchad pa /

མཚོ་རུམ་ལོང་ལ་དག་ཐོག་མ། རྒྱ་འབངས་ལས་རྒྱ་རྗེ་གཏན་གྱི་རྗེར་མྱི་རུང་ནས། །བཙན་པོ་ལྷ་སྲས་ལ་གློ་བ་ཉེ་སྟེ། །བློན་སྐྱེས་བཟང་ལ། ཕྱག་འཚལ་ནས་ཕོ་ཚེད་ཟང་མང་ནི། གསེར་ཆེན་ཕོ་སྩལད། ། ལོང་ལ་དག་གཙང་ཅེན་སྩལད་པ་ལས་ལོ་དགུ་བཅུ་ལོན་དེ་གུམ་བའི་མཆད་པ་

Now a transliteration, line by line (reversed letter “i” not noted), with an attempt at scientific exactitude:

1. mtsho: rum: long: la dag: thog: ma / rgya: 'bangs: las:
2. rgya: rje: gtan: gyi: rjer: myi: rung: nas // btsan: po: lha: sras: la:
3. glo: ba: nye ste // blon: skyes: bzang: la: / phyag: 'tshal: nas: pho: tshed zang
4. mang: ni / gser: chen pho: stsald // long la: dag gtsang cen stsald pa: las lo
5. dgu bcu lon de gum ba'i mchad pa

And finally, here is my translation, presented with no sense of perfection or finality:

[This is the tomb of] Long-la-dag of mTsho-rum. The origin [of the affair is as follows]: the Chinese subjects no longer accepted the Chinese monarch as being qualified to be a stable (or permanent) monarch; therefore, [Long-la-dag] pledged his allegiance* to the Tibetan Emperor, a descendent of gods (lha-sras, ~devaputra), and made obeisance to the councilor Skyes-bzang [d. 757]. As a result, Pho Tshed-zang-mang was granted a great gold letter (mark of rank) and Long-la-dag was given an official rank of gtsang-chen. Finally, attaining the age of ninety, he died. [Here is] his tomb...

(*Actually used here is that endearing Old Tibetan phrase literally meaning '[getting] near to the lungs,’ that in effect means to develop a warm relationship, to grow fond of someone. May I point out that the heart and lungs together occupy the same chest?)

 

Bibliocracy

For the text of the relevant inscription — the OTDO dates it to post-757 CE — look here. 

Megan Bryson, “Tsenpo Chung, Yunnan wang, Mahārāja: Royal Titles in Narratives of Nanzhao Kingship between Tibet and Tang China,” Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, vol. 24 (2015), pp. 59-76. Most highly recommended of all.

Édouard Chavannes, “Documents historiques et géographiques relatifs à Li-kiang,” T'oung Pao, series 2, vol. 13 (1912), pp. 565-653. This ought to be made available at the Brill website (brill.com).

___, “Une inscription du royaume de Nan-Tschao,” Journal Asiatique, series no. 9, vol. 16 (1901). Look here. It was thanks to the late Helga Uebach's bibliography that I could locate these two essays by Chavannes.

Lewis Doney, Dependency at the Centre & Periphery of the Tibetan Empire: Sayings, Doings and Interagency, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, Working Paper 12 (2023), in 25 pages.  Link here.

Nathan Hill, Old Tibetan Inscriptions, Old Tibetan Documents Online Monograph Series no. 2, Research Institute for Languages & Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Tokyo 2009). At p. 10 is an edition of the text, with references to the literature, including some not listed here. Look here.

Khagang Palchen Thar (Dpal-chen-thar), “South Jang or Ha Stele,” Tibet Journal, vol. 30, no. 2 (Summer 2005), pp. 61-68. 

Liang Yongjia, “Stranger-Kingship and Cosmocracy, or, Sahlins in Southwest China,” Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, vol. 12, no. 3 (2011), pp. 236-254.

Duncan J. Poupard, “Writings on the Wall: Powerful Inscriptions in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands,” Asian Anthropology (2021), online publication. In actual fact about graffiti that use Dongba hieroglyphics, but anyway interesting: 

https://doi.org/10.1080/1683478X.2021.1889788.

Takata Tokio, “A Note on the Lijiang Tibetan Inscription,” Asia Major, vol. 19, nos. 1-2 (2006), pp. 161-170.

Helga Uebach (1940-2021), “Tibetan Officials in the 8th-Century Southeastern Part of the Empire,” contained in: C. Scherrer-Schaub, ed., Old Tibetan Studies, Brill (Leiden 2012), pp. 53-64.

Wang Yao (1928-2015), “Yunnan Lijiang Tufan gubei shidu zhaji” [=Notes on an Old Tibetan Inscription Found in Lijiang, Yunnan Province], Tang yanjiu (=Journal of Tang Studies), vol. 7 (2001), 421-427, 2 pls. Reference simply lifted from Nathan Hill, Old Tibetan Inscriptions. For references to a few more Chinese-language studies, check the OTDO.

Yamada Noriyuki. “The Mu Native Official’s Governance of the Tibetan World and His Sponsorship of Tibetan Buddhism,” contained in: Christian Daniels and Jianxiong Ma, eds., The Transformation of Yunnan in Ming China: From the Dali Kingdom to Imperial Province, Routledge (London 2020), pp. 111-136.

•

PS: For our amusement, I transcribe the museum’s English-language label, as given. I suspect it is based on the Chinese, rather than directly on the Tibetan, and if so this might go toward explaining why it preserves that Chinese term Tubo instead of translating it into what we all recognize was and is Tibet. It calls itself a synopsis rather than a translation, and so it is:

“The regional chieftain of Cuorong area was firstly elected by local people to supervise the local officers. However, the leader was not in a good relationship with officers of Han majority, he was getting on well with the emperor of Tubo, and eventually came over and pledged allegiance to Tubo. The emperor bestowed him a golden prize (the highest award). Thereafter, he died naturally at the age of ninety.”

Well, I hope you found it somehow instructive or otherwise worthwhile, if not I typed it out in vain. You might notice, for one thing, that the name of the Tibetan minister Skyes-bzang has entirely disappeared. And then we should say that the rank of gtsang-chen is hardly the highest ministerial rank, but rather very close to the lowest. Erased is the clear statement that the Chinese subjects were the ones unhappy with their ruler. Surely this is said with reference to the An Lushan Rebellion that started in 755 CE. Gone, too, is the suggestion that the Yunnan leader regarded the Chinese Emperor as less than permanent (gtan) or stable (brtan), depending on how we want to understand that syllable. Oh, and see how less than clear it is that it was, after all, the Tibetan Emperor (and not just any old emperor) who bestowed on Long-la-dag the ministerial rank of gtsang-chen.

This Tibetan inscription doesn’t in the least support those who nowadays toss about the Beijing-approved claims that Tibet was always part of China (with the vague repeated rhetoric “since ancient times”), just the opposite. And this holds true regardless of whose translation you turn to.

• • •

PPS (June 9, 2026)

One of the chief puzzles in the translation is what to do with the apparent proper name Pho Tshed-zang-mang. I am just sharing some thoughts here, but I suppose this might be following a traditional personal name-forming system known to long exist among the Nakhi people in northern Yunnan. According to Mathieu’s essay listed just below, names were formed from four single-syllable elements, the first one identifying the mother's clan name, then the father's personal name, thirdly the wife's clan name, and finally ego's personal name, in that order. The Pho in the Tibetan transcription (if that is what it really is) could indicate a known Nakhi matrilineal clan the Pu. Pho does not ever seem to function as a single-syllable clan name in Tibet, even if there is no way to feel entirely sure. Well, it is just a thought. For more look here:  

Christine Mathieu, “Matricultural Resilience in Historical Context: A Focus on the Naxi Nationality,” Matrix: A Journal for Matricultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (March 2021), pp. 176-201.

On the other hand, Bryson’s essay (listed above) mentions how Nanzhou rulers’ names, in three syllables, began with the final element of their fathers’ name. And I must say the last two syllables, zang & mang, do have an Old Tibetan feel about them (they would look quite natural, whether together or separated, as part of a personal name during the imperial era), so I am not entirely sure it is necessary to turn to the Nakhi or the Nanzhou rulers after all.

Bryson also points out something we should have known. There is a song celebrating the political alliance in the Old Tibetan Chronicles. This courtly poetry ought to be revisited by our wizened Old Tibetanists before it is too late for them and for us.*

(*As so often happens, I was out looking for something else on the internet when an interesting collection of Old Tibetan sources on Yunnan popped up on my screen. It even includes an English translation (admittedly based on Jacques Bacot's century-old French translation) of the song we just mentioned. Just have a look at Ludwig M. Brinckmann, “Yúnnán in the Old Tibetan Annals: An Annotated Translation of Texts Related to Yúnnán in Tibetan Texts Discovered at Dünhuáng,” online publication [version: October 2024].)

 •  •  •

Tibetsploitation: New Lows in Phoney on Amazon

Total Tibethenticity, am I right?

Illegal warning, to be read before reading any further than this, since doing so would involve implicating yourself in its full rainbow of ridiculous ramifications: 

That is correct. By viewing this posting you could be exposing yourself and your loved ones to the crassest of commercializations. As you are reading along, the blogger may try to stake valid claims on a large fraction of your annual income even while clocking your views for fame and profit (the more scrolling up and down the better and please subscribe to my channel by clicking on some button or another). While some of what you will see here certainly does contain A.I. generated content, this blog itself was generated by me, the blogger, a human being made up of elements liable to dissolve more quickly than our latest robots, and without the least assistance from them (to be clear, he may serve as an information provider to said robots, but is not responsible for what they do with it, as it is not their intelligence to begin with). If you buy any of these print or audio objects on my recommendation, why is that my problem? 

This is in all truth a non-commercial educational blog, but sometimes books, even bad books, are the subject of it, so be forewarned and beware your own irrational purchasing impulses. 

While you are at it, it would be good to keep all of those kleshas under check, particularly the warring ones. Day after day we check the headlines at the risk of utter horror at the stupidity and barbarity of our modernized world, its semi-autonomous weaponry and drone citizenry. Is it any wonder humanities are getting dropped from curricula everywhere? There is no place for it, no appreciative audience and scarcely a glimmer of humanity to be seen.

I know it is my fault for even going there, but with missiles flying this way and that in our dot-of-blue planet I had nothing better to do than to check what the latest Tibet offerings on Amazon might be. If you are ill advised and want to do the same, just go to the site, plug the word Tibetan into the native Amazonian search box, then ask it using the pull-down menu to list the titles by dates of posting (“Newest Arrivals”). That way the latest ones will appear first. Some of these gems we can only look forward to as they haven’t actually been released, but, as you scroll down you will find some that are already unleashed on the world for better, sometimes, but so much more often for worse.

Remember Christopher Hansard? Abducted by Amdo Bon monks from a New Zealand beach at the age of four with his parental consent, he purveyed something he took from the pages of a Namkhai Norbu book, something called Dur Bon (for our non-initiates that’s 'Dur Bon, or འདུར་བོན་). 'Dur Bon is the Bon of funerary rituals involving the evocation of the dead, although it comes out to be, in Hansard’s usage only, all about health and longevity. He would probably fail to sense any irony in his choice of back stories. I recall there was at one time, hung up on his website, a purported Bon sutra in supposed translation that draws to an end when Lord Shenrab, normally dated to the BCEs, sat down to reflect awhile, whilst taking long thoughtful drags on his pipe. Ummm. Wasn’t smoking introduced to the Tibetan Plateau in the 17th century or so? So what was he smoking? Are there bona fide scriptures locatable in the Bon canon that recommend or even mention smoking of anything? We may note with some satisfaction that Hansard’s books are not featured among the new arrivals. Have those creative juices dried up?*

(*A little web exploring turns up a practitioner 0f Dur Bon named Steph back in New Zealand, but little else. Steph gives facials using Tibetan acupuncture if you are interested. Google’s A.I. today expressed its belief in Tibetan acupuncture, using Steph's website as its primary evidence. In truth acupuncture did exist in Tibet, but was scarcely ever used apart from the Golden Needle therapy called gser-khab. This doesn’t always necessarily employ a needle made of gold, but it does involve burning moxa on the top of a needle inserted into the top of the head and not the face.)

Getting around to our main subject at last: I was not thrilled to see that the third most popular topic for Tibetsploitation fan fiction, after the mastiffs & apsos dog books and the inevitable but soul-gnawing singing bowls, was The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Dozens of these new bardo books can be seen there by such authors as Ethan Reed, David M. Eaton, Alex Moraes Soares,* Bo Bae, Michael Collins, John M. Styron, Ilario Russo, Muhamad Fahad Ikram, John Baldock, Tracey Wagstaff, Michael Grant Owen, Emanuel Maia, etcetera. Why so many so fast, and why now? Did someone declare open season? Do they all live in Dubai and meet up at the same condo parties? Believe me if I tell you, I haven’t read any these books (or audios or kindles), and I suppose there are gems folded into this furious slurry of prose that I will never find. I recommend checking the “author’s pages” of these authors to see what other books they put out under their names. Then it ought to dawn on even your average-to-middling dullard that a majority of these authors are poised to make a buck off of other cultures as well. Much to our surprise a few of them even virtuously offer their A.I.-narrated audiobooks free of charge.**

(*This one is narrated by Zephir, the glitched pharaoh. **"Free" if subscription fees are paid first? You may have noticed all those YouTube channels with their videos about animal rescue and unlikely animal relationships [mother cat suckling baby owl for example] or human-carnivore friendships... No doubt you have gotten plenty of them on your social media feeds if you have the ill fortunate of belonging to F.B., X or the like. Blame yourself if you volunteered for hell.)

Then there’s that anti-gravity book that needs attention, the one by Vincento. Tibetan weight-loss, too, looks like a potentially winning topic that may not be entirely unrelated to anti-gravity. That is, if you enjoy sipping Tibetan miso soup. See our frontispiece, above. Its advice may work, which is not the point here.

Afraid what answer I might get, I went ahead and asked Google A.I. to recommend a good pseudonym to slap on the cover of my new fake take on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Number one in its list of suggestions was “Karma Lingpa, Jr.”  Well... seeing this made me wonder how we could possibly say A.I. is incapable of humor and irony... Was that just a one-time accident? Or one of A.I.’s now-famous hallucinations? 

Seeing what we are made to deal with, preserving our collective and personal sanity is the fulltime duty of every humanist, from now until eternity, apparently. Giving them salaries won’t be necessary, but hey, Thanks for the offer.

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Recommended with Strong Hesitations

Diohka Aesden, Tibetan Bon: Ancient Shamanistic Tradition: Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche Buddha and the Mystery of the Bla ‘Gugs Soul Retrieval within the Shamanic Practices ... [Esoteric Religious Studies Book 26] Kindle Edition. Even the author might be A.I. generated as far as I can tell. Obviously the art is. Check out this author’s list. Awesome stuff, dude! It is literally astounding how much this young man has managed to create while traveling the globe. A hundred books? When if ever will Amazon start requiring A.I. content to be clearly marked as such at the very beginning? Amazon seems to be evolving some sort of policy on this issue, and we can imagine it getting stricter as time soldiers on. 

So before laying out hard earned money on this book, read carefully and reflect on what the compositor admits in the long paragraph, visible after scrolling down, labeled “Technological Use.” Its initial statement is: “This series uses a number of AI technologies to research the topics presented.” Is this volunteered honesty offered to potential readers? Or is it Amazon-required disclosure involving self-justification? Perhaps avoiding answering directly the more important question of how much A.I. was responsible for the actual composition? All this gives pause, and serious cause for reflection.

Russell Ash, “Cricketer’s Guide to Insect Music,” The Independent (Brisbane; Monday, March 21, 1994), Miscellany section, p. 13. This humor piece makes light of — you may even say trivializes — Berthold Laufer’s (1874-1934) major contributions to Asian studies.* Laufer spent most of the last half of his life as curator at the Chicago Field Museum. It provoked a brief response by then-curator of the Field Museum Bennet Bronson. Ash’s piece was republished in a 1995 book entitled Bizarre Books that I never personally perused, but his slyly humorous piece on Laufer, an author he never actually read, I uncovered xeroxed in a file drawer, hidden until a few days ago, and this is what inspired today’s idiotic blog aimed at writings that are, in my humble opinion, much more richly deserving of our lack of attention.

(*With thanks to one of my mates, G.S. for sharing it with me some 30 years ago.)

Martin Brauen, Traumwelt Tibet — Westliche Trugbilder, Verlag Paul Haupt (Bern 2000). I only have the German, although I know an English translation is available. Primarily about the historical development of the European and English-speaking world’s mental images of Tibet, later on in the book Brauen highlights how these images have in our modern times been exploited by profit-motivated interests that have indeed reached ridiculous or ridiculously offensive low-points, like ashtrays with Buddha’s image showing through the glass or thangka-themed kitchen aprons.

Thierry Dodin & Heinz Räther, eds., Imagining Tibet: Perceptions, Projections, and Fantasies, Wisdom Publications (Boston 2001). Originally published in 1997 as Mythos Tibet: Warnehmungen, Projektionen, Phantasien.* While several of the essays do directly investigate Tibetsploitation, whether of the rather naive or supercynically sinister kinds, more to the point is the book by Brauen, listed just above. I should also mention Donald Lopez Jr.’s influential 1998 book, Prisoners of Shangrila.

(*The essay titles do not entirely match up, so if you have only the English book you will still need to go to the German to read Reinhard Greve, “Das Tibet-Bild der Nationalsozialisten,” and Oskar Weggel, “Die politische Rechte und Linke im Meinungschaos um das Tibet-Problem.” Evidently its publisher thought their subject-matter would be of little interest to the Anglophone world, where there are neither Nazis nor rightists, am I right?)

Peter Kelder, Eye of Revelation: The Original Five Tibetan Rites of Rejuvenation, originally published in 1939, “From a Long Lost Manuscript Come the Ancient Tibetan Rites for The Fountain of Youth,” and “The True Tibetan Rites Revealed.” It was repackaged in the mid-’90’s as The Five Tibetans and then received a lot more attention, but of late has been heard from less and less. Are people getting wise? I see evidence that could indicate the opposite.

Tsering Shakya, “The Myth of Shangri-la,” posted at Tibetan Buddhism in the West website, originally published in 1991.

Johnny Vincento, Tibetan Monks' Anti-Gravity Method: New Theory for Anti-Gravity: How to Stop the Wheel of Samsara, Kindle Books (2024). Among his other highly plausible books is my favorite title, Dinosaur Seen through Quantum Entanglement Wormhole. It just makes you feel like crawling in to enjoy the view. Not sure why I would want to complain about Vincento having his say, just that Tibetans of the past have had their own ideas about levitation, and it remains to be seen if any of them are featured here.

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A Further Comment on the Reels (April 7, 2026)

And do I need to mention all those inspirational Chinese and/or Tibetan Buddhist monk videos by A.I. prompt-masters popping up right now on YouTube and Instagram? That’s where the real Tibetsploitation is going on right now, I understand. They prey on the nones — the “spiritual but not religious” — to make those scarcely spiritual revenues flow instantly into their digital wallets.

Notice the presence of the singing bowl
and the very oddly shaped Tibetan book, placed there to generate trust

Hear this exposé of Yang Mun by France 24 English:

Tap here if the video does not appear below.

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Inspired by the reaction to Aloka, the dog that walked along side the actual non-digital Buddhist monks in the March for Peace that garnered so much media attention, these young prompters of reels (“creators” is what these miscreants call themselves) saw the combination of Buddhism and pets as having true viral potential. And the simulacrum monk Shen Yu* has nearly proven them right.

*Note: The link is to the YouTube channel. Most of Shen Yu’s cat videos seem to be on Instagram and Facebook (two of the social media platforms I studiously avoid), and not on YouTube.

Go to Lion's Roar, where you can read this essay by Rod Meade Sperry: ‘Buddhist orgs are issuing warnings about AI deepfake videos.’

“Part of the content is even contrary to the teachings of Buddha dharma and may mislead and cause confusion among practitioners,” one of the statements says.