Sanskrit Manuscript Circulation in Medieval Indian Buddhist Monasteries

This presentation begins with an examination of the colophons found in Sanskrit manuscripts preserved in Tibet. Many of these colophons include Tibetan annotations that occasionally record information such as a manuscript’s provenance, place of storage, and the identities of its successive owners. These marginal notes offer vivid testimony to the processes through which Sanskrit manuscripts were preserved, transmitted, and inherited within the Tibetan cultural sphere. This observation, in turn, invites the question of whether comparable practices of ownership, preservation, and transmission were also characteristic of Indian Buddhist monastic communities.
In contrast to the Tibetan context, the evidentiary record for India is far more fragmentary, though not entirely absent. The present study provides a provisional survey that brings together and systematizes the surviving traces of evidence concerning the ownership, preservation, and transmission of Sanskrit manuscripts within medieval Indian Buddhist monastic environments.