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Reconstructing the Pagan Religion of Tibet

Descripción del proyecto

Reconstrucción de la religión pagana tibetana

El budismo llegó al Tíbet en el siglo VII y se convirtió en la religión nacional oficial en el siglo VIII. Aunque la mayoría de los tibetanos practica el budismo, una pequeña minoría sigue el bön, una religión indígena con influencias budistas, a menudo denominada «paganismo tibetano». Hasta 2005, solo se podía acceder a un número limitado de manuscritos antiguos de diversas fuentes procedentes de la Ruta de la Seda, el sur del Tíbet y la literatura bön reformada. Sin embargo, un importante descubrimiento reveló manuscritos pertenecientes al grupo de sacerdotes Leyu y que contenían rituales y narraciones no budistas muy antiguos. En el proyecto PaganTibet, financiado por el Consejo Europeo de Investigación, se pretende estudiar estos manuscritos Leyu y reconstruir la religión pagana tibetana. Los resultados incluirán una base de datos consultable, un catálogo anotado, traducciones y resúmenes de las obras seleccionadas.

Objetivo

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 Bn, which its adherents (Bnpos) and Buddhists alike consider to be the countrys indigenous faith. Bn 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 Bn 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 Bn. 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.

Ámbito científico (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS clasifica los proyectos con EuroSciVoc, una taxonomía plurilingüe de ámbitos científicos, mediante un proceso semiautomático basado en técnicas de procesamiento del lenguaje natural.

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Régimen de financiación

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

Institución de acogida

ECOLE PRATIQUE DES HAUTES ETUDES
Aportación neta de la UEn
€ 2 492 375,00
Dirección
RUE FERRUS 4-14
75014 Paris
Francia

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Región
Ile-de-France Ile-de-France Paris
Tipo de actividad
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Enlaces
Coste total
€ 2 492 375,00

Beneficiarios (1)