Avalokiteśvara in Dunhuang and Tibet
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The period in which the famous Tibetan cult of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (Tib. sPyan ras gzigs) took shape remains disputed. Some have sought his cult’s incipience towards the end of the second millennium or even at the dusk of the Tibetan Empire (ca. 7th c. to 842, Tib. Bod chen po), while others consider it the fruit of religious developments during Tibet’s so-called later propagation of Buddhism (from the late 10th/early 11th c. onward, Tib. \(\textit {phyi dar}\)). This paper illuminates the matter by studying the textual history of two highly influential early Tibetan sources concerning this bodhisattva, the \(\textit {Ma ṇi bka’ ’bum}\) [Collected Works on the \(\textit {Maṇi (Mantra)}\)] and the \(\textit {bKa’ chems ka khol ma}\) [Pillar Testament]. Diachronic analyses of these two works are important topics in their own right, yet also illuminate the growth of the distinctively Tibetan mythology that would come to surround Avalokiteśvara. In a bid to further draw out historical developments, findings from these two sources are presented in combination with Tibetan Dunhuang (敦煌) documents and Tibetan Plateau sources from the period of the later propagation of Buddhism in Tibet. This combined survey provides a more fine-grained view of Avalokiteśvara’s unparalleled rise in Tibetan religion. In the process, the article rewrites our understanding of the history of the \(\textit {Collected Works}\) on the \(\textit {Maṇi (Mantra)}\), while also developing new insights into the rise to prominence of the six-syllable mantra \(\textit {Oṃ ma ṇi pad me hūṃ}\), Avalokiteśvara’s growing roles in Tibetan history, as well as his relation to Amitābha/Amitāyus.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".