This talk presents work in progress on an early Tibetan Buddhist anthology, alternatively titled mDo sde brgyad bcu khungs “Quotations from Eighty Sutras” or rNal ’byor chen po bsgom pa’i don “Essentials for the Practice of Mahāyoga”, which has recently become available from a collated edition by Helmut Tauscher (2021). This anthology is attributed to an otherwise unknown sPug Ye shes dbyangs (fl. ca. 735-814 CE), and contains in total 441 quotations from a wide variety of scriptural sources, arranged in a catechetical format structured by 88 questions. In his trailblazing study, Tauscher has managed to identify the sources of many of the quotations. Still, in quite a number of cases, the sources are marked by Tauscher as “not identified”. In this talk, I will report on my latest findings with regard to those unidentified quotations, and argue that the fact that their sources remain unidentified in Tauscher’s study is potentially significant from a historical perspective. Source criticism (Quellenkritik) of that sort will prepare the ground for some preliminary attempts at contextualizing the findings against the backdrop of the reception history of Buddhist sutras in imperial Tibet, which was an integral part of a connected Buddhist world encompassing Tang China, Pāla Bengal, and beyond.

Ruixuan Chen is Assistant Professor in Buddhist Studies at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS). He received a Magister Artium in Classical Indology from the University of Munich (2014) and a PhD in Buddhist Studies from Leiden University, the Netherlands (2018). His main field of specialization is the history of Buddhism in ancient and early medieval South and Central Asia. He investigates, first and foremost, processes of scriptural formation, issues of canonicity, interplays between religious idea(l)s and practices, the institution of Buddhist kingship etc., against the backdrop of the transmission of Buddhism from Indian subcontinent to various cultural spheres along the ancient Silk Routes.

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