Project description
Revealing key cultural elements of Tibetan Buddhist communities
Between the 11th and 14th centuries, Buddhist communities on the Tibetan Plateau developed a myth that helped define Tibet and its relations with neighbouring regions. Their texts link the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, the 7th-century emperor Songtsen Gampo, and the Tibetan people into a shared origin story. These writings show how religion, politics, and identity were closely intertwined in premodern Tibet. However, the origins of this literature remain unclear. The ERC-funded FOUNT project aims to study newly identified manuscripts to establish a solid text-historical basis for influential Tibetan Buddhist sources. The findings will shed light on the development of key cultural elements, while producing case studies on topics central to Tibetan cultural, religious, and political history.
Objective
Between the 11th and 14th centuries, Buddhist communities on the Tibetan Plateau crafted a national charter myth that was to have immense cultural staying power. The narrative literature that successfully promoted this myth would inflect the cultural, religious, and political landscape of Tibet even into the 21st century, and greatly impact Mongolia, the Himalayas, and other Asian Buddhist communities as well. Yet the genesis and even original content of this literature has now turned out, thanks to the PI’s efforts, to be poorly understood, which greatly hinders progress in a number of fields. Using newly identified and until now unstudied manuscripts, we will:
1) establish a sound text-historical basis for using these hugely influential sources;
2) illuminate the rise of major elements of Tibetan Buddhist culture, including a national culture hero and the mythology of the land’s patron deity;
3) produce case studies on a variety of topics central to Tibetan cultural, religious, and political history.
Because this Buddhist literature promoted the existence of an intimate relationship between the country’s patron deity (the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara), a divine king (the 7th-century Emperor Songtsen), and the Tibetans themselves, it throws important light on premodern relations between religion, politics, and collective identity. As such, it has world-historical implications. Yet the lack of text-historical groundwork ensures that scholars who wish to consult these materials, which were subject to centuries-long copying, adaptation, and mutual borrowing, immediately find themselves on unfirm ground. We will set the entire field on sounder footing by mapping the history of these early compositions and plotting their evolution. Using this new foundation, we will then study the genesis of Tibet’s far-reaching cultural complex.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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1010 Wien
Austria
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