FCHNT

The history of Tibet remains obscure in many of its parts, despite the research accumulated during the past decades. And yet, there are tens of thousands of pages of historiographical material that remain unexploited. This documentation takes the form of religious genealogies–series of biographies of individuals belonging to institutions which represent themselves as families. Writing history often has to do with constructing legitimacy; in Tibet, it takes the form of the narration of the spiritual pedigree of religious masters: the transmission of tantric materials has to be authentic, continuous, and illustrated by heroic figures who, in each generation have illustrated the power and value of what they were transmitting. Thus, in order for the historian to achieve a global view, one must first follow these many and singular threads–and then try to reweave them the way they were actually interwoven into the real fabric of Tibetan history. This compels us to an intermediate stage between the primary sources and the historian proper's syntheses: the task of the philologists, editing and comparing the documents, restoring their meaning, detailing what is reported as facts while trying to locate and date them through crossing the available sources, with also the idea to give them more context. For such a preliminary work, one should pick up, among the many Tibetan religious lineages, one that is sufficiently documented through a well-preserved literature; that kept a strong sense of its identity over many centuries; and that played an important role in many aspects of the Tibetan life, so that its study will cast light on many unknown aspects of the Tibetan history. So we have chosen one branch of the “Ancient Order” (rNying ma) of Tibetan Buddhism: the Jangter (Byang gter) or “Northern Treasures”, which perfectly satisfies these three requirements. The Nyingmapas trace their origins to the first diffusion of Buddhism in the 8th century. But most of their doctrines, practices and liturgies belong to the category of "hidden treasures" (gter ma), the fruit of a subsequent and continuous process of revelation of which the "Northern Treasures" are a typical, albeit singular case. It is in 1366 that Rigdzin Gödem (1337-1408) is said to have extracted from a cave in Central Tibet one of the most famous sets of such "Treasure-texts" (15 large volumes), the initial core of the "Northern Treasures", to which get amalgamated further "discoveries" by his later reincarnations, but also those of other mystics. A very large part of the textual legacy of the Northern Treasures, hitherto inaccessible has been published in 2015 in the form of a 63-volume compilation, a complete copy of which was recently purchased by the Instituts d'Asie of the Collège de France. This is what makes our project both possible and necessary: we must exploit this treasure finally available. Vol. 62 of this collection contains a large History of the Treasures of the North (905 p.) which will serve as a framework for our project, which will consist of a critical translation of this chronicle, supplemented and amended by the materials available elsewhere (about 4000 p. of historiographical documents in this compilation, not counting the innumerable precious elements that are scattered in the ritual texts) The team of specialized researchers submitting the present project has set itself the main objective of producing four volumes that broadly respect the overall architecture of this History, while adding to it chapters that it lacks on aspects of the history of the Northern Treasures that have not been retained because of the taste of Tibetan historians for linear narratives in the form of genealogies. The four years over which this program is to be spread should be sufficient to bring these four volumes, if not to a directly publishable state, at least to a form requiring only editing work for publication in the following years.