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47-755: Palyul Monastery ( Tibetan : དཔལ་ཡུལ་རྣམ་རྒྱལ་བྱང་ཆུབ་ཆོས་གླིང་། , Wylie : dpal yul rnam rgyal byang chub chos gling ), also known as Palyul Namgyal Jangchub Choling Monastery and sometimes romanized as Pelyul Monastery , is one of the "Six Mother Monasteries" of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism . It was founded in 1665 by Rigzin Kunzang Sherab in Pelyul in Baiyü County , Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in China's Sichuan province, on

94-403: A Buddhist convent is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Tibetan script The Tibetan script has also been used for some non-Tibetic languages in close cultural contact with Tibet, such as Thakali , Nepali and Old Turkic . The printed form is called uchen script while the hand-written cursive form used in everyday writing is called umê script . This writing system

141-542: A cave, the so-called Library Cave (Cave 17), which had been walled off sometime early in the 11th century. The documents in the cave were discovered by the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu , who was interested in restoring the Mogao Caves, on 25 June 1900. In the next few years, Wang took some manuscripts to show to various officials who expressed varying level of interest, but in 1904 Wang re-sealed the cave following an order by

188-492: A height of nearly ten feet, and filling, as subsequent measurement showed, close on 500 cubic feet. The area left clear within the room was just sufficient for two people to stand in. Stein had the first pick and he was able to collect around 7,000 complete manuscripts and 6,000 fragments for which he paid £130, although these include many duplicate copies of the Diamond and Lotus Sutras . Pelliot took almost 10,000 documents for

235-758: A large number of documents from Caves 464 and 465 in the northern section of the Mogao Caves. These documents mostly date to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), several hundred years after the Library Cave was sealed, and are written in various languages, including Tibetan, Chinese, and Old Uyghur . The Dunhuang documents include works ranging from history, medicine and mathematics to folk songs and dance. There are also many religious documents, most of which are Buddhist , but other religions and philosophy including Daoism , Confucianism , Nestorian Christianity , Judaism , and Manichaeism , are also represented. The majority of

282-458: A space. Spaces are not used to divide words. The Tibetan alphabet has thirty basic letters, sometimes known as "radicals", for consonants. As in other Indic scripts , each consonant letter assumes an inherent vowel ; in the Tibetan script it is /a/. The letter ཨ is also the base for dependent vowel marks. Although some Tibetan dialects are tonal , the language had no tone at the time of

329-400: A type of palimpsest whereby papers were reused and Buddhist texts were written on the opposite side of the paper . Hundreds more of the manuscripts were sold by Wang to Ōtani Kōzui and Sergey Oldenburg . In addition to the manuscripts that he acquired from Wang, Pelliot also uncovered a large number of manuscripts and printed texts from Caves 464 and 465 (Pelliot's Caves 181 and 182) in

376-490: A wide variety of religious and secular documents (mostly manuscripts, including hemp, silk, paper and woodblock-printed texts) in Tibetan, Chinese, and other languages that were discovered by Frenchman Paul Pelliot and British man Aurel Stein at the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang , China, from 1906 to 1909. The majority of the surviving texts come from a large cache of documents produced at the historic printing center between

423-496: A written tradition. Amdo Tibetan was one of a few examples where Buddhist practitioners initiated a spelling reform. A spelling reform of the Ladakhi language was controversial in part because it was first initiated by Christian missionaries. In the Tibetan script, the syllables are written from left to right. Syllables are separated by a tsek (་); since many Tibetan words are monosyllabic, this mark often functions almost as

470-410: Is above most other consonants, thus རྐ rka. However, an exception to this is the cluster རྙ /ɲa/. Similarly, the consonants ར /ra/, and ཡ /ja/ change form when they are beneath other consonants, thus ཀྲ /ʈ ~ ʈʂa/; ཀྱ /ca/. Besides being written as subscripts and superscripts, some consonants can also be placed in prescript, postscript, or post-postscript positions. For instance,

517-666: Is designed as a simple means for inputting Dzongkha text on computers. This keyboard layout was standardized by the Dzongkha Development Commission (DDC) and the Department of Information Technology (DIT) of the Royal Government of Bhutan in 2000. It was updated in 2009 to accommodate additional characters added to the Unicode & ISO 10646 standards since the initial version. Since

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564-528: Is simply read as it usually is and has no effect on the pronunciation of the consonant to which it is subjoined, for example ཀ་ཝ་ཟུར་ཀྭ (IPA: /ka.wa.suː.ka/). The vowels used in the alphabet are ཨ /a/, ཨི /i/, ཨུ /u/, ཨེ /e/, and ཨོ /o/. While the vowel /a/ is included in each consonant, the other vowels are indicated by marks; thus ཀ /ka/, ཀི /ki/, ཀུ /ku/, ཀེ /ke/, ཀོ /ko/. The vowels ཨི /i/, ཨེ /e/, and ཨོ /o/ are placed above consonants as diacritics, while

611-560: Is solely for the consonants ད /tʰa/ and ས /sa/. The head ( མགོ in Tibetan, Wylie: mgo ) letter, or superscript, position above a radical is reserved for the consonants ར /ra/, ལ /la/, and ས /sa/. The subscript position under a radical can only be occupied by the consonants ཡ /ja/, ར /ra/, ལ /la/, and ཝ /wa/. In this position they are described as བཏགས (Wylie: btags , IPA: /taʔ/), in Tibetan meaning "hung on/affixed/appended", for example བ་ཡ་བཏགས་བྱ (IPA: /pʰa.ja.taʔ.t͡ʃʰa/), except for ཝ , which

658-578: Is used across the Himalayas and Tibet . The script is closely linked to a broad ethnic Tibetan identity, spanning across areas in India , Nepal , Bhutan and Tibet. The Tibetan script is of Brahmic origin from the Gupta script and is ancestral to scripts such as Lepcha , Marchen and the multilingual ʼPhags-pa script , and is also closely related to Meitei . According to Tibetan historiography,

705-705: The Dunhuang Caves"), a pioneering work about the Dunhuang manuscripts. The variety of languages and scripts found among the Dunhuang manuscripts is a result of the multicultural nature of the region in the first millennium AD. The largest proportion of the manuscripts are written in Chinese, both Classical and, to a lesser extent, vernacular Chinese . Most manuscripts, including Buddhist texts, are written in Kaishu or 'regular script', while others are written in

752-898: The Latin script . Multiple Romanization and transliteration systems have been created in recent years, but do not fully represent the true phonetic sound. While the Wylie transliteration system is widely used to Romanize Standard Tibetan , others include the Library of Congress system and the IPA-based transliteration (Jacques 2012). Below is a table with Tibetan letters and different Romanization and transliteration system for each letter, listed below systems are: Wylie transliteration (W), Tibetan pinyin (TP), Dzongkha phonetic (DP), ALA-LC Romanization (A) and THL Simplified Phonetic Transcription (THL). The first version of Microsoft Windows to support

799-518: The 9th-century spoken Tibetan, and current pronunciation. This divergence is the basis of an argument in favour of spelling reform , to write Tibetan as it is pronounced ; for example, writing Kagyu instead of Bka'-rgyud . The nomadic Amdo Tibetan and the western dialects of the Ladakhi language , as well as the Balti language , come very close to the Old Tibetan spellings. Despite that,

846-577: The British sinologist Arthur Waley . “I think the best way to understand [the feelings of the Chinese] on the subject is to imagine how we should feel if a Chinese archaeologist were to come to England, discover a cache of medieval manuscripts at a ruined monastery, bribe the custodian to part with them and carry them off to Peking. [...] Pelliot did, of course, after his return from Tun-huang, get in touch with Chinese scholars; but he had inherited so much of

893-482: The King which were afterward translated. In the first half of the 7th century, the Tibetan script was used for the codification of these sacred Buddhist texts, for written civil laws, and for a Tibetan Constitution. A contemporary academic suggests that the script was instead developed in the second half of the 11th century. New research and writings also suggest that there were one or more Tibetan scripts in use prior to

940-732: The Tibetan keyboard layout is MS Windows Vista . The layout has been available in Linux since September 2007. In Ubuntu 12.04, one can install Tibetan language support through Dash / Language Support / Install/Remove Languages, the input method can be turned on from Dash / Keyboard Layout, adding Tibetan keyboard layout. The layout applies the similar layout as in Microsoft Windows. Mac OS -X introduced Tibetan Unicode support with OS-X version 10.5 and later, now with three different keyboard layouts available: Tibetan-Wylie, Tibetan QWERTY and Tibetan-Otani. The Dzongkha keyboard layout scheme

987-490: The Tibetan script was developed during the reign of King Songtsen Gampo by his minister Thonmi Sambhota , who was sent to India with 16 other students to study Buddhism along with Sanskrit and written languages. They developed the Tibetan script from the Gupta script while at the Pabonka Hermitage . This occurred c.  620 , towards the beginning of the king's reign. There were 21 Sutra texts held by

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1034-509: The arrangement of keys essentially follows the usual order of the Dzongkha and Tibetan alphabet, the layout can be quickly learned by anyone familiar with this alphabet. Subjoined (combining) consonants are entered using the Shift key. The Dzongkha (dz) keyboard layout is included in Microsoft Windows, Android, and most distributions of Linux as part of XFree86 . Tibetan was originally one of

1081-407: The basic Tibetan alphabet to represent different sounds. In addition to the use of supplementary graphemes, the rules for constructing consonant clusters are amended, allowing any character to occupy the superscript or subscript position, negating the need for the prescript and postscript positions. Romanization and transliteration of the Tibetan script is the representation of the Tibetan script in

1128-434: The caves were subsequently taken to England and France by European explorers Stein and Pelliot. Knowing that the Dunhuang manuscripts were priceless treasures, Stein and Pelliot swindled Wang and bought them for very little money. They took these treasures from China to Europe. In addition to the Library Cave, manuscripts and printed texts have also been discovered in several other caves at the site. Notably, Pelliot retrieved

1175-418: The consonants ག /kʰa/, ད /tʰa/, བ /pʰa/, མ /ma/ and འ /a/ can be used in the prescript position to the left of other radicals, while the position after a radical (the postscript position), can be held by the ten consonants ག /kʰa/, ན /na/, བ /pʰa/, ད /tʰa/, མ /ma/, འ /a/, ར /ra/, ང /ŋa/, ས /sa/, and ལ /la/. The third position, the post-postscript position

1222-416: The cursive Xingshu or 'running script'. An unusual feature of the Dunhuang manuscripts dating from the 9th and 10th centuries is that some appear to have been written with a hard stylus rather than with a brush. According to Akira Fujieda this was due to the lack of materials for constructing brushes in Dunhuang after the Tibetan occupation in the late 8th century. The Dunhuang manuscripts represent some of

1269-582: The earliest examples of Tibetan writing . Several styles are represented among the manuscripts, forebears of the later Uchen (dbu can) and Ume (dbu med) styles. Both Old Tibetan and Classical Tibetan are represented in the manuscripts, as well as the undeciphered Nam language and a language that some have identified as the Zhangzhung language . Other languages represented are Khotanese , Sanskrit , Sogdian , Tibetan , Old Uyghur , and Hebrew , as well as Old Turkic (e.g. Irk Bitig ). By far

1316-883: The eastern edge of Tibet in Kham . The monastery is the seat of the Nam Chö Terma of Terton Mingyur Dorje . Drubwang Padma Norbu (Penor Rinpoche) was the 11th throneholder of the Palyul lineage. Upon his mahaparinirvana in March, 2009, Karma Kuchen Rinpoche became the 12th throneholder. Namdroling Monastery in Bylakuppe , India , is where the current throneholder to the Palyul lineage has resided since exile from Tibet during Chinese annexation . 31°12′57″N 98°49′19″E  /  31.2157°N 98.8220°E  / 31.2157; 98.8220 This article about

1363-471: The equivalent of £90, but, unlike Stein, Pelliot was a trained sinologist literate in Chinese, and he was allowed to examine the manuscripts freely, so he was able to pick a better selection of documents than Stein. Pelliot was interested in the more unusual and exotic of the Dunhuang manuscripts, such as those dealing with the administration and financing of the monastery and associated lay men's groups. Many of these manuscripts survived only because they formed

1410-416: The fact that, according to Rong and Hansen (1999) there was an organized method to the manner in which many manuscripts in the caves were placed; “Buddhist texts that had been divided into sections, labeled, and then placed in wrapped bundles." The reason for the cave's sealing has also been the subject of speculation. A popular hypothesis, first suggest by Paul Pelliot, is that the cave was sealed to protect

1457-418: The governor of Gansu concerned about the cost of transporting these documents. From 1907 onwards, Wang began to sell them to Western explorers, notably Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot . According to Stein who was the first to describe the cave in its original state: Heaped up in layers, but without any order, there appeared in the dim light of the priest's little lamp a solid mass of manuscript bundles rising to

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1504-592: The grammar of these dialectical varieties has considerably changed. To write the modern varieties according to the orthography and grammar of Classical Tibetan would be similar to writing Italian according to Latin orthography, or to writing Hindi according to Sanskrit orthogrophy. However, modern Buddhist practitioners in the Indian subcontinent state that the classical orthography should not be altered even when used for lay purposes. This became an obstacle for many modern Tibetic languages wishing to modernize or to introduce

1551-452: The introduction of the script by Songtsen Gampo and Thonmi Sambhota . The incomplete Dunhuang manuscripts are their key evidence for their hypothesis, while the few discovered and recorded Old Tibetan Annals manuscripts date from 650 and therefore post-date the c. 620 date of development of the original Tibetan script. Three orthographic standardisations were developed. The most important, an official orthography aimed to facilitate

1598-553: The largest proportion of manuscripts from the Dunhuang cave contain Buddhist texts. These include Buddhist sutras , commentaries and treatises, often copied for the purpose of generating religious merit . Several hundred manuscripts have been identified as notes taken by students, including the popular Buddhist narratives known as bian wen ( 變文 ). Much of the scholarship on the Chinese Buddhist manuscripts has been on

1645-469: The late 4th and early 11th centuries, which had been sealed in the so-called ' Library Cave ' (Cave 17) at some point in the early 11th century. The printing center at Sachu (Dunhuang) was also Tibet's imperial printing house during the 8th and 9th centuries, when Tibet controlled the Silk Roads. The Library Cave was discovered by a Daoist monk called Wang Yuanlu in 1900, and undocumented contents of

1692-561: The manuscripts Pelliot took and are stored in the Bibliothèque nationale de France's collection are in Tibetan. Other languages represented are Chinese, Khotanese , Kuchean , Sanskrit , Sogdian , Tibetan , Old Uyghur , Prakrit , Hebrew , and Old Turkic . The manuscripts are a major resource for academic studies in a wide variety of fields including history, medicine, religious studies, linguistics, and manuscript studies. The majority of surviving Dunhuang manuscripts were kept in

1739-497: The manuscripts at the advent of an invasion by the Xixia army, and later scholars followed with the alternative suggestion that it was sealed in fear of an invasion by Islamic Kharkhanids that never occurred. Even though cave 16 could easily have been enlarged or extended to cave 17, Yoshiro Imaeda has suggested cave 16 was sealed because it ran out of room. Liu Bannong compiled Dunhuang Duosuo (敦煌掇瑣 "Miscellaneous works found in

1786-448: The manuscripts themselves. Various reasons have been suggested for the placing of the manuscripts in the library cave and its sealing. Aurel Stein suggested that the manuscripts were "sacred waste", an explanation that found favour with later scholars including Fujieda Akira. More recently, it has been suggested that the cave functioned as a storeroom for a Buddhist monastic library, though this has been disputed. Reasons for this include

1833-472: The nineteenth-century attitude about the right of Europeans to carry off ‘finds’ made in non-European lands that, like Stein, he seems never from the first to last to have had any qualms about the sacking of the Tun-huang library.” While most studies use Dunhuang manuscripts to address issues in areas such as history and religious studies, some have addressed questions about the provenance and materiality of

1880-530: The northern section of the site. These documents date to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), and are written in various languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, and Old Uyghur . The documents also include over two hundred fragments of texts written in the Tangut language , which is significant as the Tangut script (devised in 1036) is entirely absent from the Library Cave documents. Scholars in Beijing were alerted to

1927-404: The radical ཀ /ka/ and see what happens when it becomes ཀྲ /kra/ or རྐ /rka/ (pronounced /ka/). In both cases, the symbol for ཀ /ka/ is used, but when the ར /ra/ is in the middle of the consonant and vowel, it is added as a subscript. On the other hand, when the ར /ra/ comes before the consonant and vowel, it is added as a superscript. ར /ra/ actually changes form when it

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1974-738: The region. Rumours of caches of documents taken by local people continued for some time, and a cache of documents hidden by Wang from the authorities was later found in the 1940s. Those purchased by Western scholars are now kept in institutions all over the world, such as the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France . All of the manuscript collections are being digitized by the International Dunhuang Project , and can be freely accessed online. “The Chinese regard Stein and Pelliot as robbers,” wrote

2021-453: The script's invention, and there are no dedicated symbols for tone. However, since tones developed from segmental features, they can usually be correctly predicted by the archaic spelling of Tibetan words. One aspect of the Tibetan script is that the consonants can be written either as radicals or they can be written in other forms, such as subscript and superscript forming consonant clusters . To understand how this works, one can look at

2068-776: The scripts in the first version of the Unicode Standard in 1991, in the Unicode block U+1000–U+104F. However, in 1993, in version 1.1, it was removed (the code points it took up would later be used for the Burmese script in version 3.0). The Tibetan script was re-added in July, 1996 with the release of version 2.0. The Unicode block for Tibetan is U+0F00–U+0FFF. It includes letters, digits and various punctuation marks and special symbols used in religious texts: Dunhuang manuscripts Dunhuang manuscripts refer to

2115-532: The significance of the manuscripts after seeing samples of the documents in Pelliot's possession. Due to the efforts of the scholar and antiquarian Luo Zhenyu , most of the remaining Chinese manuscripts were taken to Beijing in 1910 and are now in the National Library of China . Several thousands of folios of Tibetan manuscripts were left in Dunhuang and are now located in several museums and libraries in

2162-467: The translation of Buddhist scriptures emerged during the early 9th century. Standard orthography has not been altered since then, while the spoken language has changed by, for example, losing complex consonant clusters . As a result, in all modern Tibetan dialects and in particular in the Standard Tibetan of Lhasa , there is a great divergence between current spelling, which still reflects

2209-512: The vowel ཨུ /u/ is placed underneath consonants. Old Tibetan included a reversed form of the mark for /i/, the gigu 'verso', of uncertain meaning. There is no distinction between long and short vowels in written Tibetan, except in loanwords , especially transcribed from the Sanskrit . The Tibetan alphabet, when used to write other languages such as Balti , Chinese and Sanskrit , often has additional and/or modified graphemes taken from

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