by Kurtis Schaeffer (University of Virginia, 2009)
Taken as a whole, the Degé Kangyurs (བཀའ་འགྱུར་, bka’ ’gyur) and Tengyurs (བསྟན་འགྱུར་, bstan ’gyur) – and the canons of Tibetan Buddhism more generally – present by virtue of their arrangement a sort of literary history of Indian Buddhism, beginning with the “words of the Buddha” in the form of manuals of monastic conduct, sūtras, and tantras, moving through the commentarial literature and independent treatises of exoteric and esoteric writers, and concluding with a structured presentation of the major fields of learning that would have been shared by any intellectual community in India regardless of religious affiliation. As might be expected in a two-part collection that boasts anywhere between 4500 and 5200 titles and has developed over a millennium, the Kangyur and Tengyur as a whole were never permanently fixed, though of course some sections remained more stable than others. Considered in this light, the Tibetan collection might be thought of as a “canon” not in reference to the Biblical canon (with its relatively small number of approved works); rather, the Tibetan “canon” can be usefully compared to a literary canon, a collection of “great books,” the authority of which as a whole may be agreed upon by a large majority of concerned intellectuals, yet details of which are the subject of constant debate as the collection is reproduced.
The most basic division made within this collection is between the Kangyur, or “The Word in Translation,” and the Tengyur, or the “Treatises in Translation,” a distinction made by the thirteenth century at the latest. Every work contained in the Kangyur is in principle the word of the Buddha – although both traditional and contemporary scholarship cast a critical eye upon the literary history of the sūtras and tantras. The assignation of the term “Word” (བཀའ་, bka’) to a particular work in the Tibetan canons might better be understood as an attribution of authority rather than a statement about its historical provenance, and traditional bibliographers were well aware that this was a fluid category open to criticism and debate. The works contained in the Tengyur are treatises composed by Buddhist writers flourishing in the long millennium that constituted Buddhism’s florescence in India – say from the second century until the decline of Buddhism in India in the twelfth century – though there are even works composed as late as the seventeenth century included in later sections of the Tengyur, as well as translations made in the eighteenth century included in later editions.