Monastic Chronicles ( gdan rabs )

There are various genres of Tibetan literature, including rnam thar (biography), lo rgyus (history), chos ’byung (history of Buddhism), rgyal rabs (royal chronicles), and grub mtha’ (tenet classification systems), but few studies have examined the details of each individual genre. In particular, there is no detailed study of gdan rabs (monastic chronicles), the genre of literature that describes the history of monasteries and the genealogy of successive abbots, except for a short commentary by Vostrikov (1970). In my previous study (2016), I dealt with the Rwa sgreng gi bshad ba nyi ma’i ’od zer, published in 2010, which was discovered in the secret private library of the Fifth Dalai Lama (1617-1682) and seems to be one of the earliest works of this style of monastic chronicles literature. This study, therefore, aims to clarify the full picture of monastic chronicles by comparing the composition of the Rwa sgreng gi bshad ba nyi ma’i ’od zer with other representative monastic chronicles

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