Brandon Dotson

The result of the authors’ painstaking documentation of over 1,500 Tibetan copies of the Sutra of Limitless Life from Dunhuang, now kept in the British Library’s Stein Collection, this book provides a detailed study of the sutra copies, how they were produced for the Tibetan emperor in ninth-century Dunhuang, and how they were conserved in twentieth-century England. It explores the lives of Dunhuang’s multi-ethnic scribes, editors, and administrators and reveals how their practices changed in a short period of time during the 820s. In addition, the book surveys the significant differences across the multiple Tibetan and Chinese versions of the Sutra of Limitless Life (Tib. Tshe dpag du myed pa’i mdo; Ch. Wuliangshou zongyao jing; Skt. Aparimitayu? sutra) circulating in Dunhuang at this time, and introduces a previously unknown Tibetan version. Through working with such a large cross section of the Stein Collection, and by coming to terms with one of the single largest groups of Dunhuang manuscripts, the book provides new insights into how these manuscripts were documented and conserved, on their way from Dunhuang through Khotan to London and at the British Museum, India Office Library, and British Library.

What do dice and gods have in common? What is the relationship between dice divination and dice gambling? This interdisciplinary collaboration situates the tenth-century Chinese Buddhist “Divination of Mahesvara” within a deep Chinese backstory of divination with dice and numbers going back to at least the 4th century BCE. Simultaneously, the authors track this specific method of dice divination across the Silk Road and into ancient India through a detailed study of the material culture, poetics, and ritual processes of dice divination in Chinese, Tibetan, and Indian contexts. The result is an extended meditation on the unpredictable movements of gods, dice, divination books, and divination users across the various languages, cultures, and religions of the Silk Road.