Namgyal Monastery lies at an altitude of 3,850 meters, on a hill west of Lo Montang, the old capital of the Mustang kingdom, a very remote region in the Nepalese-Tibetan borderlands. While its foundation goes back to earlier times, its fifteenth-century enlargement established it as a thriving Buddhist institution providing a home to a huge number of monks and a remarkable collection of Buddhist material culture including statues, thangkas, and manuscripts.

Among these various sacred objects, two collections of Buddhist canonical literature stand out for their age and complex illumination programmes. This book presents the visual and textual contents of these two sets of Buddhist manuscripts and analyses them from the perspectives of manuscript studies, art history, and textual analysis.

Two Illuminated Text Collections of Namgyal Monastery: A Study of Early Buddhist Art and Literature in Mustang, Christian Luczanits and Markus Viehbeck, Vajra Books, Hardcover (8.5" x 10.5"), 393 pages, $65.00

Christian Luczanits is David L. Snellgrove Senior Lecturer in Tibetan and Buddhist Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His research focuses on Buddhist art of India and Tibet, in particular Gandharan and early Tibetan art, the latter largely based on extensive field research and documentation done in situ. This study is a product of an ongoing research project on Tibetan Buddhist Monastery Collections Today.

Markus Viehbeck works as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of South Asian, Tibetan, and Buddhist Studies, University of Vienna. His research interests address diverse topics within Tibetan intellectual history, Buddhist literature and philosophy, and the interlinkage of religious and social history, with a focus on working with textual sources. In his current project, he studies manuscripts of Tibetan canonical literature and contributes to building up a comprehensive database for Resources for Kanjur and Tanjur Studies (rKTs).

CONTENTS: Two Illuminated Text Collections of Namgyal Monastery
Preface and Acknowledgements	7
Conventions	10
Introduction Buddhist Heritage in Mustang	15
Chapter One The Manuscripts at Namgyal: Codicology, Orthography, and Paleography	27
Catalogue One Prajnaparamita Set	45
Chapter Two Illumination Programs: The Visual Subtext of Two Text Collections	93
Catalogue Two Sutra Collection	145
Chapter Three The Textual Contents of the Namgyal Manuscripts: Beyond the Mainstream Kanjurs	341
Concluding Remarks Historical Traces, Visual Pointers, and Potential Prospects of the Namgyal Manuscripts	363
Bibliography	370
Indices	379