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Tibetan Chan III: more teachings of Heshang Moheyan
In the last post we were looking at Heshang Moheyan, the Chinese teacher of Chan (better known in the West as Zen) who became for Tibetans a lesson in how to go wrong in meditation. He taught, they...
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The Golden Turtle: A Sino-Tibetan divination manuscript
Astrology was, and surely still is, an important part of life in Tibet. As in most other Asian countries, astrology played the vital role of deciding whether to carry out an important activity – a...
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From the Taklamakan, with Love
Most of the archeological discoveries from Central Asia now in British museums and libraries were brought here by the explorer Marc Aurel Stein in the early 20th century. But not all of them. Others...
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New Publication: Manuscripts and Travellers
Another brief note to say that my new book, Manuscripts and Travellers, co-authored with Imre Galambos (who also writes the Shahon blog) has just been published. Since it retails at just shy of 100...
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André Alexander, 1965-2012
I am very sad indeed to hear of the sudden and unexpected death of André Alexander. I had only recently finished working with him on an article based on one of his many conservation projects. Working...
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New Publication: Old Tibetan Texts in the Stein Collection Or.8210
Just out — a new catalogue of 88 Tibetan manuscripts from the Dunhuang cave, held here at the British Library but previously neglected because they were catalogued in the sequence dedicated to Chinese...
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Defining Mahāyoga
Some years ago I was chatting to someone at a conference about the work I had been doing on Mahāyoga texts in the Dunhuang collections. “But what,” he asked, “is Mahāyoga anyway?” Though the later...
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Captain Bower’s adventurous journey
Detail from the cover of Hamilton Bower’s Diary of a Journey Across Tibet I first heard of Captain Hamilton Bower as the man who made the first major manuscript find in the Central Asian deserts: the...
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