Project description
Reconstructing the Tibetan pagan religion
Buddhism first reached Tibet in the 7th century and became the official national religion in the 8th century. While the majority of Tibetans practise Buddhism, a small minority follow Bön, an indigenous religion with Buddhist influences, often referred to as Tibetan Paganism. Until 2005, only a limited number of early manuscripts from various sources, including the Silk Road, southern Tibet, and reformed Bön literature, were accessible. Then a significant discovery revealed manuscripts belonging to a group of priests known as Leyu, containing genuinely ancient non-Buddhist rituals and narratives. The ERC-funded PaganTibet project aims to study these Leyu manuscripts and reconstruct the Tibetan Pagan religion. The findings will include a searchable database, an annotated catalogue, translations, and summaries of selected works.
Objective
Buddhism was introduced to Tibet in the 7th century CE and became the official national religion in the 8th. A small percentage of Tibetans are followers of a religion called Bön, which its adherents (Bönpos) and Buddhists alike consider to be the country’s indigenous faith. Bön came to acquire many Buddhist features but retained a strand of more archaic traditions. Since there is no evidence that these traditions were actually called Bön prior to the establishment of Buddhism, we refer to them collectively as Tibetan Pagan religion. Until now, all we knew about this religion came from a small number of early (mainly 8-11th c.) manuscripts from the Silk Road, a small cache from southern Tibet, and some ritual narratives in the literature of “reformed” Bön. This situation changed dramatically in 2005 with the discovery of a large number of manuscripts constituting the ritual repertoire of a class of priests, called Leyu, in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands. Although facsimiles of some 35,000 folios of these manuscripts have now been, or are due shortly to be, published in China, other than the PI and members of his team no one has worked on them owing to difficulties of script, language and the concepts conveyed. Preliminary investigations suggest that these texts contain genuinely archaic non-Buddhist rituals and narratives closely resembling those of the early sources that are already known. Using state-of-the-art computational humanities tools such as Handwritten Text Recognition and Natural Language Processing in conjuction with the methods of philology, comparative religion and anthropology, PaganTibet proposes to undertake a systematic study of the Leyu manuscripts, producing a searchable database of the entire corpus, an annotated catalogue of its contents as well as translations and extended summaries of a selection of its works, to provide the first-ever reconstruction of Tibetan Pagan religion.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- humanitiesphilosophy, ethics and religionreligionseastern religions
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdatabases
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdata sciencenatural language processing
- social sciencessociologyanthropology
- humanitieslanguages and literatureliterature studieshistory of literature
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
75014 Paris
France