Tibetan blag-pa and blags-pa

Abstract

The word blags-pa occurs in line 48 of the Li-yul chos-kyi lo-rgyus. A manu-script of this work, brought back from Tun-huang by Paul Pelliot, has been described by F. W. Thomas in his Tibetan literary texts and documents concerning Chinese Turkestan, London, 1935, p. 303, n. 1, and by Marcelle Lalou in Inventaire des manuscrits tibetains de Touen-houang, n, Paris, 1950, p. 25, No. 960. The text has been translated by F. W. Thomas, op. cit., 305–23. R. E. Emmerick has edited the text in his Tibetan texts concerning Khotan, London, 1967, 78–91. Emmerick's glossary (op. cit., 108–60) has to be consulted for his interpretation of the text. The passage which contains the word blags-pa is the following: thos-pa'i bsod-nams kyaṅ bskal-pa gcig-gi sdig 'byah // blags-pa'i bsod-nams ni / bskal-pa grans myed-pa'i sdig 'byan //. Thomas reads slags-pa'i instead of blags-pa'i and explains in a note that slags = Klags (p. 313, n. 2). His translation is as follows: ‘The merit of even hearing it cleanses the sin of one æon; the merit of reading it cleans the sin of countless æeons’. Emmerick states in his glossary: ‘blags (pf. <blag-pa “to hear”) 48. F. W. Thomas has “reading”, with the note slags = klags (TLT i.313 n. 2). But the reading is blags on my photograph, blag-pa is “to hear“ by itself or with rna-ba. So Das, Russ. D. against Jä’.