To judge from the impressive body of Padampa's sayings jotted down by his disciple Kunga and then topically reordered by Kunga's disciple Patsab in decades before and after the year 1100 CE,* Padampa never voiced any autographical narrative. Well, never in all seriousness, otherwise we might need to bring up "The Seven Wonders of the World," a topic I keep thinking to blog about.**
(*The history of the growth, the collection and arrangement, of the Zhijé Collection as a whole was subject for a paper given in 2013 with the long title, “A Tree Gives Testimony on its Own Growth Rings: Arboreal and Other Metaphors for the Underlying Spatio-Temporal Organization of the Zhijé Collection, a Post-1245 CE Manuscript as Far as I Know.” It was never published, although I may post it. **For sure, there are several dozen introductions to texts in the Zhijé Collection, evidently as told by Kunga, some possibly by Patsab, where eulogistic forewords often feature biographical elements, but those are not a subject for today despite their undoubted significance.)
We should speak of one other matter before getting started. I know many people have an emotional reaction to what they might see as historical revisionism. They understandably feel more comfortable with histories that simply add to what they already believe. More seriously, some others may see what I am doing as an unfair attack on the tradition. I have to say, I have for decades been and will always continue to be an admirer of Padampa in particular and the Tibetan forms of Buddhism and Bon overall.
The tradition has in fact had its internal critics of this thing or that throughout history and I see myself now and then reenacting this critical vein despite myself. It is exercised out of love of truth and respect for bearers of truth and not from spite or mean spiritedness. I hope you will be able to sense this so I won't be made to defend myself unnecessarily along these lines. After all, as far as history is concerned, believers ought to believe in what is believable, and make this a priority, even a demand. Knowing the truth about this or that historical detail of a spiritual lineage can have little or no effect on the effectiveness of its teachings on matters such as prayer or meditation. This being true, at the same time there is no denying that historians in every field are coming to new conclusions about the past all the time, particularly when new manuscripts and artifacts come to light. The revision is not the real problem, it's the motivation we see or imagine lurking in the shadows.
For the sake of those who will not be reading further, for whatever reason, today's blog will stumble toward a conclusion while giving examples of how elements of human memory, moving in and out of oral and written contexts, get kaleidoscoped in the process. Seeing this can optimally result in a brightened contemporary understanding of the historical events the histories meant to convey. My borrowed metaphor is in truth too strong since the changes did not take place nearly so quickly or with all the intricately patterned detail, let alone symmetry, we expect when we look into a kaleidoscope. Let's say the metaphor is a bit over the top and leave it at that.
After putting together that corpus of eight early Zhijé histories I call “The Library,”* one of my first ideas was to examine the two histories of the Kam lineage, found far apart in Ladakh and Bhutan, to see if as seemed likely, they held text in common. Since my first efforts failed me, I went on to use a few online text comparison sites to make sure. I quickly found out that they have practically no common phraseology, and nothing that could be called a parallel passage. But as I hope you will soon see, they do have similarities in the information they contain, something not easily detected by the automated word crunchers. Why? Largely because the proper names are spelled differently, and because words appear in different order. Is it coincidence that these are the sorts of matters we intend to focus on like a laser today?
(*See Tibeto-logic's recent blog “More Than We Imagined: Early Zhijé Histories” for the list. For convenience I number these histories Z1 through Z8, in order of the dates of composition I have determined with more and less certainty for them.)
So let's start with those two brief Kam lineage histories, before looking at the So history and so on, and investigate a little what we can learn from them about Padampa's birth and parentage. Here you see the passage from the Matho manuscript of the Kam [Z2]:
dang po ni rgya gar lho phyogs byed da'i yul nas kan tsi ta zhes bya ba na / khang 'gro ma [~mkha' 'gro ma??] dang shind tu nye ba na / shing [m]khan [?] cig la bu cig btsas nas / bram ze mtshan [m]khan la bstan pas / 'di ni chos sbyor ba'i skal ba ldan ba yin no / zhes lung bstan to /
Notes on the content: Byed-da in South India must be the be-ta of other sources. I think it just means 'coconut', a descriptive and not a proper name (more on this soon). I do not find "kan tsi ta" in BUDA, although "kan tsi," which I suppose to mean Kañci,* is there to be found (a more correct Tibetan transcription would be kanytsi, but in order to search in BUDA try "kany+tsi" quotemarks included). It may appear to be very near a place named Khang-'gro-ma (this sentence will get more attention later on). There a child was born to a carpenter, the mother is neglected and the parents are neither named nor identified by caste. He was shown to the Brahmin soothsayer and name-giver,** who prophesied, "This one has the good fortune of applying himself to religion."
(*A thriving city in northern Tamil Nadu today. **In Indian traditions the child's destiny and name are intertwined — the name might even be indicated through astrological calculations, but local customs do vary. A remarkable feature of Z2 is that his first naming is postponed until after his studies, when he is named as Paṇḍita Ajitanātha [pan byi ta myi 'pham 'gon po].)
And here is the passage from Bhutan's Kam history [Z5b]:
de la rje dam pa de sku gang du 'khrungs na / rgya gar rdo rje gdan gyi lho phyogs / be ta la zhes bya ba'i yul / grong khyer ka 'ji ta zhes bya ba / shin tu mkha' 'gro ma 'du ba der sku 'khrungs so //
rigs gang yin na / yab shing bzo' mkhan / yum bram ze'i rigs de gnyis kyi sras su sku 'khrungs / de yang skyes ma thog tu bram ze mkhan la mtshan bstan pas / 'di khyod rigs shing bzo' ba ma yin ste / chos byed pa'i rigs su 'ong pas / ming yang 'jig rten mgon po bya bar thogs cig zer skad //
To paraphrase the main information — Here the southern country is called Betala (Be-ta-la),* and the town Kañjita (Ka-'ji-ta). It was very much a gathering for kandromas.** Here his father is a carpenter, while his mother is a woman of the Brahmin caste. The Brahmin name-giver denies the child is of carpenter caste and predicts he will instead belong to the Dharma practicing class. It is for this reason he names him Lokanātha, 'Lord of the People.'
(*The added 3rd syllable la may be explained by a copyist imagining a locative ending was part of the name. I must admit I had lingering doubts if the Tibetan word borrowing for 'coconut' might not have entered the picture only in modern times, but I recently noted an early usage of be-ta, in a context in which the meaning is not in doubt, in one of the Tanjur texts credited to Padampa [or his visions] that reassured me. And this vindicates my rejection of speculations about it being a proper name and somehow devolved from Vidarbha, a leap of faith I was never able to take. Vidarbha, a region where something like Marathi was spoken, has never been regarded as part of south India, has it? South of center, if Bihar is at the center, I suppose. **Note the very awkward syntax of the adverbial immediately before the word for sky-goers, kandroma... We might think it is a kind of extremely extreme kandroma? We will try to think this through shortly.)
This denial of carpenter caste should be kept in mind.
Even if spellings are different, I believe both Kam histories give the country of his birth as the southern part of India that is, as a whole, given the name 'Coconut.'* with the specific town called Kanjita or Kantsita. Both give him the childhood name Lokanātha.
Now compare the So lineage history preserved in Drametsé Monastery [Z5a]:
yul lho phyogs tsa ra sing nga dad pa can gyi gling zhes bya ba mi rigs mi 'gra ba bzhi 'tshogs pa'i sa / skad rigs mi 'gra ba bzhi khrom pa'i gling / gyad stobs po che 'byung pa'i gnas / thugs rje chen pos byin gyis brlab pa'i sa / shin tu mkha' 'gro ma nye ba'i gnas der sku 'khrungs so //
rigs ni bram ze'i rigs / yab ded dpon brtson 'grus go cha / yum bram ze mo spe ra sa / de la sras gsum yod pa'i bar pa rje dam pa 'di yin skad / [2r] de yang yum gyi lhums na bzhugs pa'i dus su / mi reng (?) dkar po mdung tsam ba cig byung nas / khyod las dpon sras cig btsa bas / des sems can ma [~mang?] phan thogs pa cig yong pa yin / de'i ming mi 'phan mgon po [~mi pham mgon po] bya bar thogs cig gsung skad /
Here the father and mother are given names for what I think might be the very first time, and both would be of Brahmin caste. The Father, a seacaptain, is named something like *Vīryavarman in back-translation, but the mother's name Spa-ra-sa presents more difficulties.* Her occupation isn't specified here, while her caste, given as Brahmin, could have been presumed on the basis of her husband's.
(*Perhaps it is Svarasa, with meaning of a pure plant extract. In the following, you see she is identified as an incense maker, and this may make the plant extract more plausible, although this can hardly be settled. Post-1300 spellings for her name include Sa-ra-sa-ta, Ba-ra-sa-ha, Ra-sa-ha, Sam-ti-ra, Sa-ma-ti-ra, Sa-ma-ti, Sa-mā-dhi and Ya-ra-sa-ha. The Rgya Bod Yig-tshang even has this far outlier: Hangs-ni.)
This history adds new significant information that he had siblings. He was the middle of 3 children. Here a figure in a dream while his mother was still pregnant (and not the Brahmin name-giver) is the one who awards him his first-given name Ajitanātha (and not Lokanātha).
The Ma lineage history from Drametse (Z5c) is quite abbreviated overall, so if it has fewer details here it isn't surprising. The surprise is that his mother is not only an incense maker by profession, but simultaneously of Brahmin caste. The father is here a Brahmin, and at the same time he is, as he would remain for all of the later biographies of Padampa, a sea captain (a "jewel taker").
The 'Gos-chung history (Z8), in its biography of Padampa, has him born of a shing-bzo-ba, a "woodworker," his mother a Brahmin. Judging on the basis of the lineage supplied at the end, the author 'Gos-chung ought to himself belong to a Kam lineage. So we might think he would likely adhere to what the other, earlier Kam histories say. So just perhaps we could say that whenever we see a carpenter father, it must be a Kam lineage author. It remains to be sure if this is as true as it seems to be.
In the biography of Padampa found written into the margins of an India-made palmleaf manuscript of the Perfection of Wisdom the carpenter is not to be found, His father is a 'jewel taker,' a seafaring merchant. Unique to this curious text — it could have been scribed anywhere between 12th and 15th centuries — the father was not a Brahmin but a Kshatriya.* This text, one I only learned existed thanks to the kindness of friend Kano Kazuo, deserves close study in the future. Should it be necessary to point out that merchants of any kind ought to belong to the Vaishya caste?
(*The text says rje blon, in this context signifying he was both of Kshatriya caste and a governmental minister of some kind, possibly an ambassador.)
So, meandering down the mountainside path on our way to a few conclusions of variable strengths, let's think a bit about what we have seen so far about the caste, birthplace and parentage, meanwhile introducing a few new bits of evidence:
Among all the now available biographical accounts of Padampa, there are only three largely unavailable and unrecognized histories of the Kam transmission that say he was from the city of Kanchi (Kāñcī), i.e. Kanchipuram of presentday northern Tamil Nadu. Practically all others— that means the commonly available ones that have so far been used by Tibetanists — agree his birthplace and childhood home was Tsa-ra-sing-ha, a place name never adequately accounted for (I will not go deeply into its perplexities today). For several decades past it was assumed by myself to be in a coastal region of presentday Andhra Pradesh.
(*Of course it is our first instinct to identify the city of Kanchi as the famous city, but it appears that there is more than one place in Karnataka with a name that resemble it closely enough. I am just saying that the obvious solution may not turn out to be the correct one.)
At the same time there is a particular website that links Padampa and his maternal uncle Āryadeva with the cult of Ayyapa in Kerala.* However, I think there is at least one piece of very strong evidence that would lead us to locate his childhood language area in Karnataka instead.
To get to the evidence I now regard as most compelling we have to walk outside of The Library. We find it in a text revealed by Padampa and in its mid-12th century Tibetan commentary. (Full translations of these two texts are underway.) The root text is a quite cryptic set of over 300 one-liners or, in the unlikely case the word means something to you, monostiches. Here is text and translation of no. 162. Normally when we first encounter these koan-like brain stoppers of Padampa, it is wise to first reflect on the statement for some time before moving ahead to the commentary:
byis pa a ma mthong tshe pang du rgyug pas a lu bor //
byis pa: C bus pa. a ma: C 'a ma. pang: C spang. rgyug pas: C sgyugs pas. bor: C 'bor.
162. When a child sees its mother, it runs to her lap and leaves the alu behind.
This doesn't supply us with great clues about what the intended meaning of alu might be. It was and is a strange name for something outside Tibetan experience.
Number 81 in the commentary expands on this:
'a mas bus pa brid pa la a lu byin pa de la chags / phyis 'a ma mthong ba'i tshe na a lu bor nas pang du rgyu[g].
When a mother wants to fool her child she gives it an alu, and it gets attached to it. Later on when it sees its real mother it leaves the alu behind and runs to her lap.
Now this alu obviously cannot be a word for 'potato,' since that New World tuber was not grown in the Himalayas before the end of the 18th century. It is equally plain in the context, even more so in the commentary, that alu serves as a mother-substitute, so we might imagine something like a pacifier. In consultation with David Shulman, I can say that the word for 'milk' in Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam is paalu. However, in Kannada it is haalu.
I had questioned Google A.I. a few months before, and found that in south India there is a baby feeding device typically made of metal called olale. Sometimes colloquially called alu, it is mostly used nowadays for administering medicine. So it just might be used not only for the milk, but more relevant to the Padampa usage, for the instrument made to feed that milk to the baby, likely similar to the one you see here:
If, after further deliberations, this idea proves to be as correct as I am feeling sure it is right now, then his accurate use of the word alu testifies to Padampa's Karnataka origins, only adding support to a modern belief held by numerous Tibetan exiles living there. To my shame and regret, when I was visiting Bylakuppe several years ago, I failed to take the idea seriously. I didn't take up the offer to go there for myself, settled as I then was on the idea Padampa was a Telugu speaker from the opposite side of the subcontinent. People who know me well will know this would not be my first episode of misplaced skepticism. But still, the cave I would have been taken to was on a hill outside the city of Bettalapura, and it might just be, although I never heard it stated, that someone saw Be-ta (or Be-ta-la?) in that city name as proof enough.*
(*But the Padampa sources speak of a country (yul), and not a city, and likewise in certain biographies of Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava that tell of his activities in be-ta'i yul, where it is both paired and clearly distinguished from the country of Singgala [=the island of Sri Lanka]. So a little of my old skepticism remains with me.)
I freely admit that claims on him by the four large south Indian language communities are likely to continue long into the future. I cannot vouch for the importance of this issue, having no cards in the game — well, not anymore — but right now I do believe Karnataka has the more robust evidence in its favor.
So, in order to close off this presentation with a few historiological points I believe all this leads into. This set of some of the earliest historical accounts known to Tibet's Phyi-dar era helps us to argue that historical statements they present tend to be tied to particular lineages. My best example of it: The Kam lineage, and it seems only the Kam lineage, evidently places Padampa's birthplace in Kanchipuram in northern Tamil Nadu and gives his father's profession as carpenter.
As these were largely oral lineages in their earliest phases — we have unambiguous statements about how their teachings were not recorded in written form at first — the historical accounts as we find them today are likely to bear certain marks of oral literature. One of these is the shifting of elements.* I see this in the birth accounts where the element "Brahmin," a caste identity that in the earliest account was only applied to the Brahmin soothsayer, gets attached first to the mother, and then to the father until finally, by the early 13th century we have a general statement about the family's caste status, not only as 100% Brahmin but as a particularly pure type of Brahmin. It is the standard-setting history by Rog Zhigpo (Z5) that first takes this last-mentioned step, listing four types of Brahmins of which the first and foremost is identified as the Brahmin subcaste of both of Padampa's parents. This purest-of-pure Brahmin subcaste is there called Gtsang-sgra-can, obviously meant to be Gtsang-sbra-can, used to translates Sanskrit Śrotriya. This seems to indicate the Tibetan author's unexpectedly refined knowledge of the Indian caste system. If so he overlooks the fact that the Śrotriya were Vaidikas, persons whose fulltime duties are rituals and Vedic studies. The Śrotriya would find their purity terminally compromised by engaging in any worldly occupation. We can detect in these earliest written histories a trend to solidify the Brahmin identities of the parents despite their non-Brahmin professional occupations. This is a sign these changes took place in Tibet where people were insecure in their knowledge of Indian caste.
(*Some might call it narrative drift. For modern Buddhist Studies perhaps the most famous example of a shifting or 'floating' narrative element occurs in accounts of the childhood of Siddhārtha. This means the Plowing Episode that sometimes takes place in His infancy and sometimes as a young man. The best discussions of this are in recent works of John Strong. For this and other references, see D. Martin, tr., The History of Buddhism in India and Tibet, Wisdom [2022], pp. 136-7.)
I should be fast to say that not one single text speaks of a father who is both Brahmin and carpenter. But yes, they might say the mother was both incense maker and Brahmin. Still, we can detect the virtual impossibility of an India-born person in those times being both a priestly Brahmin and a member of an occupational class such as carpenter, sea captain or incense maker. Tibetans recounting Padampa's birth story would not have seen or detected the absurdity of the very idea. So it was in Tibetan minds, not Indian, that these memory elements got shifted, jumbled, patched together and elaborated.
In the original account, as far as I feel able to divine what it must have been, the only Brahmin would have been the soothsayer and name-giver.
The incident of Padampa's first naming is another one of the wandering elements, it may be the Brahmin soothsayer who named him soon after birth, it may be a figure in his mother's dream who named him prior to his birth, or it may have been given to him after his childhood studies. And the name itself is not fixed, sometimes given as Ajitanātha, and sometimes Lokanātha.*
(*There is, as you may well object, the possibility he was called both in two acts of naming. I doubt this because no source on his childhood suggests there were two childhood naming events prior to his novice ordination. We should look into and think about this more.)
And we have seen the odd switching of elements in a single sentence about the birthplace that also involves a misreading of a cursive shorthand writing convention, reading skygoer (mkha'-'gro-ma) where trademart or bazaar (khrom, or khrom-pa for merchants or marketers) was more likely the intended word to begin with. The reasoning may be difficult to convey to those Tibetanists who haven't learned the book-cursive scripts with their shorthand writing practices. If they had they might be able to see how khrom could have been read by a copyist as mkha'-'gro-ma.* The possibility for confusion was also enhanced by the presence of 'du-ba, 'gathering,' a verb often used in association with both marketers and skygoers. The way I read the underlying sentence, it is just commenting on how very crowded with all manner of people the market was in the place of his birth. But we can at the same time appreciate that having skygoers hovering about is the more romantic option.
(*It is at least true in later manuscripts that we sometimes notice the abbreviated writing mro [མྲོ་] for mkha'-'gro, although this is quite odd in dropping the first syllable's root letter, in this case “kh”, making it an exception to normal standards.)
So... I am not quite sure what to say here at the end point of today's blog. I suppose this: As historiographologists, analysts of historical writings, we should not be content with tracing changes introduced in the recopying of manuscripts. There is no denying we need the manuscriptology. But even then we have the added complexity of thinking about the oral memory that came before and at times between the texts sitting on the page or screen before us. (And some written texts, like the sutras on the Perfection of Wisdom were first set down in letters in order to support the continuity of a pre-existing oral recitation practice.)
The problems orality opens up for us may be many but should not be avoided. True, they may not be readily attacked head on; we only even know they are there when we detect the results in the written texts. In Zhijé studies questions of orality only gain importance when we hear how the Middle Transmissions were initially passed on from mouth to ear and only written down, with much hesitation, in later generations.
I am not that academic who at the first blush of variation or contradiction in a text gets the impulse to forget there ever was a human past and throw out all the written evidence for it. There is so much of that going on in the academy these days it has become tediously normal. I do believe we get closer to the realia and realities of a historical figure or event by virtue of eliminating misguided certainties from the picture (tracing back the error, as I like to call it, tongue firmly in cheek). At this moment I cannot tell anyone with overweening certainty what Padampa's childhood was like, or even where exactly it took place, just offer a few robust suggestions. So many questions remain not asked and not answered. And just when we were thinking we have made a good start at answering some of them.
A couple of random texts
(For more bibliography, refer to the earlier blogs that were mentioned above.)
P.B. Desai, “Buddhist Antiquities in Karnataka,” Journal of Indian History, vol. 32 (1954), pp. 85-92.
Google A.I. when I consulted it today knew of so few good sources on the history of Buddhism in Karnataka, I thought I would at least offer this one. There are whole books and dissertations on the subject that are easy to locate. It is usually said the earliest local traces of Buddhism are some minor Ashokan inscriptions. Buddhist presence continued through the first millennium CE, and recent epigraphical research indicates its presence into the 16th century. It isn't necessarily of crucial importance in my opinion, to decide if the childhood of Padampa took place in a Buddhist atmosphere or not. It seems likely his family had Buddhist affinities. That his maternal uncle had become a Buddhist monk would indicate this. See also the essay by Mallinson.
Emilie van Opstall, “Stories in Motion: The Kaleidoscope as Metaphor in Comparative Studies of The Book of Sindbad the Philosopher/The Seven Sages of Rome,” Medieval Worlds, vol. 24 (2026), pp. 4-24.
The main relevance here is the metaphor of the kaleidoscope, in which the colored 'beads' of remembered elements may be shuffled and reflected in mirrors of new contexts, including new cultural contexts where revised arrangements might be required to make a story fitting for a fresh audience... This isn't exactly what I see going on in the early Padampa childhood accounts, except in a rather general way. There, too, relatively flexible, extemporaneous orality and literary revisions appear to take turns to produce the transformations we can detect in comparing surviving texts.
Richard Shaw, “Srisailam: Centre of the Siddhas,” South Asian Studies, vol. 13 (1997), pp. 161-178.
On the prakara, the long stone wall with thousands of carvings that include Siddhas, this being the main subject of this article. I should also point to a work by Rob Linrothe on Srisailam. At this point in time my thinking is that Padampa could have known about Srisailam without actually living there, as it had broad regional importance (and this fame and familiarity effectively reduces its value as evidence for geolocating Padampa's place of birth). The dating of the stone carvings is another issue that requires re-examination if we are to go anywhere of significance. Some or all of them made date as late as the 15th century.
George W. Spencer, “Religious Networks and Royal Influence in Eleventh Century South India,” Journal of the Economic & Social History of the Orient, vol. 12, no. 1 (January 1969), pp. 42-56. On religio-political situation of South India in Padampa's time.
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The frontispiece
has two details — the central figure, being Padampa, and the center bottom — of a wonderful painting of the Later Transmission lineage. It includes the teachers before Padampa and the students who came after, along with several divinized forms of the Enlightened One. The Full Pot at the bottom indicates the wealth and depths of the sources the entire lineage grew out of. The tendrils of the vine that grows out of it rise up to frame all the figures depicted in it.
For a 2011 Tibeto-logic blog on this particular painting, see “A Padampa Portrait Painting: The Middle.” Notice the double Vajra underlying the Full Pot, just like the one that underlies the mandala as well as the universe is cosmogony. This underlines the weightier symbolism of the Full Pot. It isn't just a cornucopia or wealth symbol. It is source of all that is, whatever that is.*
(*The artistic motif of the inhabited vine, more commonly seen in early Tibetan thangkas, has its own roots in history going back to Gandhara, Palmyra and beyond. For reference, see Tadashi Tanabe's essay “Peopled Vine Scroll in Gandharan Sculpture.” Download more books on Gandharan art here. **The classic essay on the subject of the Full Pot is this one: Sergiu Al-George & Arion Rosu, “Pūrṇa ghaṭa et le symbolisme du vase dans l'Inde,” Arts Asiatiques, vol. 4, no. 4 (1957), pp. 243-254.)
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PS: I've been asked with good reason to explain why any of this makes any difference. Well, to stick with the caste issue, if Brahmin-hood were to be taken away from Padampa it would have definite impact on other narratives, as for instance the ones connecting him with the sacramental medicine known as "Seven Times Reborn as Brahmin." I will have to save the reasoning for later, but this association doesn't emerge until the first half of the 13th century. Another issue I haven't addressed yet is the absence in these earliest accounts of some well-known narratives about Padampa's life and childhood continually told until our day. Like the one about his mother's abortion attempt. As they say, there are some stories that are just too good not to tell.
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PPS: I almost forgot my promise to show that passage about Padampa's own use of the word be-ta with meaning of coconut. It doesn't seem to be much use replaying the discussion in Laufer's Loanwords with its citations of Jäschke and Das dictionaries. We know Tibetan be-ta means coconut (or perhaps more accurately coconut palm) in modern Tibetan vocabulary. It is true it looks as if it were a loan from some north Indian language, but we are in no better position to figure this one out than Laufer was. We will be satisfied if it was a word for coconut that was known to Padampa, and this we can know thanks to a brief passage in ZCK I noticed recently.
be ta'i lo 'bras dus gcig 'char /
The leaves and fruits of the coconut palm appear at the same time.*
(*ZCK — ZCK is my invented abbreviation for a one-volume manuscript set entitled Zhi-byed-kyi Chos-skor. It is unpublished, although posted by BDRC as a downloadable PDF (just place “W3CN25705” in the search box at the BDRC site). In today’s blog we only make use of its section with keyletter NA and the floating title Nub-phyogs-su Gyes-pa Brda' Phran Brgya dang Brgyad-cu, with the exact passage at folio 5 recto. The text appears to be unique to ZCK, no other copy has yet appeared. The colophon informs us it was pronounced by Padampa and set down in writing by Kunga. It is one of four compilations of Padampa's metaphorical/ symbolic expressions (some including interpretative keys) that I have been working on in recent times. This reminds me I should be working on them now instead of spending so much time patching this blog together.)
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