Restoring the text of a Mahayoga tantra witnessed in Early Tibet: an early version of the 'Phags pa thabs kyi
Restoring the text of a Mahayoga tantra witnessed in Early Tibet: an early version of the 'Phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa pad ma 'phreng gi don bsdud pa 1 Cathy Cantwell and Robert Mayer Since the advent of the New Translation Schools in Tibet from the eleventh century CE, there have been uncertainties and controversies over the texts of the Buddhist traditions which had been established earlier, stemming from the translations begun during the Imperial period. Apart from polemical attacks on the Ancient or Rnying ma texts as inauthentic or degenerate transmissions, there have also been problems of generations of scribal corruption, rendering some texts within the Rnying ma tantra corpus almost unreadable, even by erudite scholarly lamas. The Rnying ma tantras did not generally receive the editorial attention which the commonly shared collection of tantric scriptures, the Kanjur (bka' 'gyur) received, and there was only one printed version of the Ancient Tantra Collection (Rnying ma'i rgyud 'bum or NGB) the Sde dge xylograph edition, for which the blockprints were made in the late eighteenth century. Moreover, the dominance of the Gter ma or Revelatory traditions from the twelfth century meant that the root tantras themselves perhaps received rather less attention than they might otherwise have done, and that many of these tantras retained only their ritual transmissions, and not their explanatory teachings.