Two notes on the london long scroll

Extract

Among the Dunhuang Tibetan texts held by the India Office Collection of the British Library is a very large scroll, catalogued as Ch. 9.II.17, and long recognized as a compendium of Tibeto-Chinese transcriptional texts. Following the practice of Walter Simon (1958), this document is now conventionally called the ‘Long Scroll’. In earlier years several small portions of it were identified by Simon and others, but more recently Professor Tokio Takata has published a transcription of the entire text and reconstructed or identified almost all of it (Takata, 1993). Nevertheless, there remain portions of the manuscript which have not yet been restored, and these present a continuing challenge to those interested both in the Long Scroll and in Tibeto-Chinese transcriptions in general. The purpose of the present paper is to fill two such lacunae.