Rgyud Bcu Bdun

Tibetan Literary Encyclopedia > Specific Tibetan Text Studies > rgyud bcu bdun

rgyud bcu bdun (The Seventeen Tantras)

This page has two sections to it:

Status of the 17 Tantras

January 24, 2008
A "first draft" of the markup of all 17 Tantras is complete. These are all posted in the "resources" section here. The tantras are now at a point that the markup needs to be reviewed, so that final adjustments can be made. Questions related to overall markup issues are in the "Detailed notes for David" section (see link just below).

After the issues about the markup of the collection have been finalized, each individual tantra still has issues particular to it that need to be resolved. These are recorded in the endnotes of each tantra.

Finally, the non-Tibetan characters will need to be added to each tantra.

The tantras also need a good proofreading, with an eye not just to spelling errors, but to the markup and to the issue of mchan having slipped into the files and having been treated as regular text (it is not always easy to distinguish mchan from root text in the AD edition).

DETAILED NOTES FOR DAVID are here. The "detailed notes" page contains questions about the overall markup, and details any special problems/issues with particular tantras, which fall outside of the "basic workplan" (described below).

Basic workplan (These are the basic issues dealt with in each of the tantras.)

Base on newest version of NormalTib
Make headings for the three main sections (front/body/back)
Add enumerations (1, 1.1, 1.1.1) to headings
Adjust outlines as necessary, proofing outlines
Mark speech as "speech verse" and "speech prose"
Put enumerations in text (like lists) into Tibetan numerals, marking as "added by editor"
Change all italics to roman (the way italics display here, it is impossible to see if there are spacing errors if anything is in italics)
Mark text with the appropriate style (paragraph, verse, speech, etc.), setting prose in paragraphs (removing hard returns after every shad)
Page Numbers: make sure all entered. Take page numbers in "PageNumber" style out of subheads, and put them in the text.
If there is a blank page at the end of a tantra, put a page number in for that, so all page numbers will be represented in the collection
Set language for everything to Tibetan PRC
Make chapter title formatting consistent
Marking names (teacher/student/speaker etc.)
Move blocks of dakini script to make them section openings (they were placed as if they were at the end of a section)
For things that cannot currently be typed in unicode, change them from "unclear" style to "illegible" style, formatted as as requested by Than: {Illegiblepage.#line}. Where these replace blocks of "dakini script" or other "non-Tibetan" language, I did not include any of that block of text, but replaced the whole block with the "illegible" note.
Mark text titles in front matter, colophons
Remove notes about adding shads, and just mark such shads "added by editor"
Check footnotes / endnotes where necessary
Search for "normal" style to find text that has fallen out of style
Type Tibetan where the Wylie did not convert
Replace all spaces with non-breaking spaces (^s)
Put heading enumerations 1.1.1.2 in "added by editor" style. (Than requested this so that they can be removed later if needed.)
Deal with any questions in the notes
Make a minimal number of questions (in endnotes) for David to respond to
Prepare a final report / to do list for each

GRAVEYARD: Past Notes / Outdated parts of this Wiki are stored here

High resolution scans based on the Adzom edition have been uploaded to the Literary THL Resources (scroll down for download link).

Scans of the sgra thal 'gyur Potala manuscript (the rin po che'i sgron ma) are in the "Resources" section of Literary THL.

Status of 17 Tantras Commentaries

Original Files

We received five commentaries to the 17 Tantras commentaries (in Sambhota font) from Tsering Gyamtso. (The commentaries are to: mu tig phreng ba, sgra thal 'gyur, sgron ma 'bar ba, sku gdung 'bar ba, yi ge med pa).

NOTE: These files were given to Chris H as a researcher; he did not receive permission to distribute them. The files represent work that was done by T Gyamtso for his publication.

Our relationship with Tsering Gyamtso has gone bad, so Chris H removed the Gyamtso's files from the "resources" section of the wiki, just to prevent any possibility of the files slipping out into circulation and making things worse. David G and Chris both have copies of these files.

At this point, I do not see how it would be ethical to use the files for anything more than research.

The sgron ma 'bar ba is an exception to this. This file was input completely by Chris H, and so all of it represents his labor, inputting from the published paper text. Chris H also has an edition that compares his unicode version of the published edition with Tsering Gyamtso's sambhota edition, but it seems like this should also be kept private.

Unicode Files with Markup

For future reference: Two of the commentaries have had work done to them. These are the two files that are not in the "original files" folder:

1. sGron ma 'bar ba: This was typed, marked up, edited, and proofed (only once) by Chris H, based on the published paper edition. The notes contain variants found in Tsering Gyamtso's electronic edition; the notes also contain emendations etc. by Chris H. This is basically ready to go, except for the fact that the headings are not the standard ones from the NormalTib template (they are marked as "Head 1" rather than "Heading 1," and display correctly in Word whereas the NormalTib headings do not). So, these heads would need to be converted to correct NormalTib style before converting to XML. This commentary should be exempt from the note above about permission, as Chris H did all the typing etc. Other desirables: a more thorough proofing would be nice, especially one based on the actual manuscript. Chris H never saw the actual manuscript (he typed from the published paper edition, which is an imperfect copy of the actual manuscript). T Gyamtsho's electronic edition was typed from the manuscript, though proofing was not complete on it when it was acquired.

2. sGra thal 'gyur: This is a file that Chris H made for personal use, but could be used as the basis for making a real edition of the commentary. It is nothing more than Tsering Gyamtso's unproofed original Sambhota file, converted to Unicode by using Unicode Document Processor (an imperfect and inaccurate method).

What is good about this file is that the chapters and questions have been marked, so the massive document is navigable in Word using the document map. Many of the paragraph breaks are in (as these are so regular it was easy to find them with "search"); thus the divisions of each section are easy to see.

Some sections appear to be marked up, but it should be understood that this is appearance only. I only marked things to orient myself, and when I was oriented I stopped marking. Some root verse appears to be marked, but I was only marking isolated bits, to make sure which verses in the tantra match with which verses in the commentary; once I determined this I stopped marking. The only goal in this markup was to get the chapter heads and questions in. It should be assumed that all other markup is incomplete, and that the markup of other headings contains errors.

Title	Author	Edition	Format	Proofed	Markup	Catalog	TOC Translation	Translation Sponsor	Details
rgyud bcu bdun རྒྱུད་བཅུ་བདུན	transcendental	adzom	Originally input by Jim Valby as Wylie. Now in Unicode Word documents. High resolution scans of the Adzom edition are in the Repository for THL	Undone; needs some proofing.	Heavily marked up Unicode Tibetan Word documents; markup by David Germano and Zach Rowinski; Germano has partial - needs to finish. Chris Hatchell has been cleaning up these file extensively starting in 9/2007	Catalog	TOC Translation	Translation Sponsor	Last updated 2008-2-28, z.rowinski.

Download pre-publication versions of the 17 tantras and commentaries:

Input Texts

Scans