Sometimes you have to leave the confines of your own library to discover something new, even when you’re a special collections librarian and have access to thousands of interesting things every day. In my case, I traveled half way across the world over the holiday break to a small town in the foothills of the Himalayas to visit a library filled with Tibetan manuscripts.
As someone whose deepest understanding of Tibet’s struggle for independence from China came from watching the Beastie Boys’ Free Tibet Concert on MTV as a teenager and passing Tibetan prayer flags on my way to Haight Street during college in San Francisco, my interest in the Tibetan library was more as a fan-girl-librarian than devotee of the discipline. I saw the Dali Lama speak at my college in 2003 and when the chance to visit India for my friends’ wedding popped up last year, I just thought, Dang, it’d be cool to visit where the Dali Lama lives while I’m in India. Makes sense that the Dali Lama lives close to a Tibetan library.
All of this is in Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, India. The Dali Lama is up the road in the suburb of Mcleod Ganj, and further down a twisty road with just enough space for one vehicle going full speed and another pulled over to let it pass is the Tibetan Administrative Complex, where the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives is located.
I rolled up to the LTWA on a sunny Saturday morning after getting lost on a path filled with Buddhist prayer wheels, stupas, and Tibetan prayer flags. Although I was filled with anxiety at arriving without previously announcing myself, the presiding manuscript librarian, one Geshe Lobsang Kalsang, welcomed me warmly. Once he understood what I was asking, a smile crept across his face and he took me into the stacks room next door to the reading room and unwrapped a 17th century work.
Tibetan works are not in the same format as western codices. They are rectangular, not bound together by sewing, and are instead wrapped in cloth, usually gold or yellow in color. The covers and some of the pages are completely burnished in black soot, which makes a dark opaque background for hand lettering in other colors, especially gold illumination as you can see on the title page of the work above. The format lends itself particularly well to works that are sutras, that is, texts used for prayer. One can sit on the ground and move each page to a stack above the original stack as one prays.
In the particular work I examined with the librarian, only the title page is a manuscript, that is, written by hand. The rest of the text is printed from wood blocks. This eliminates copying errors and obviously speeds up the reproduction process. To illustrate his point, Mr. Kalsang retrieved a wood block from the cupboard. The front and back of each page is carved into the front and back of each block of wood in mirror image. It was at this point I marveled at the craftsmanship that went into carving each Tibetan letter. Judging from the thickness of ink built up over the years, this woodblock had saved many a scribe’s hand from unnecessary cramping.
I asked him what the paper is made out of, and like any good librarian, especially when communication in a specific language is a bit of a challenge, he busted out a reference work about the technique and preservation of Tibetan paper making. According to the book, the traditional plant is called “Ri Chakpa” which is a plant native to the high altitude plateau of Tibet. The paper is made pretty much the same way any paper is made out of natural fibers: the plant’s fibers are pulped in water and once a consistency of the substance is reached, sheets are scooped out of the vat or “pond” using screens. The screens are tilted toward to the sun at an angle until the sheet dries. Paper making technology was brought to Tibet from China fifteen centuries ago, the librarian informed me.
On the left side of each page there is what we would describe as a header: repeating sections of information that state the heading of the section, an alphabet letter, and the page number.
In terms of organization, each work of the manuscript library has a fabric tag hanging off the end which serves as an identistrip, displaying the title, author, call number/inventory number, etc. The colors mean something too: white tags indicate works original to the library and orange are donations. The multi-colored tags on the works wrapped in blue on the right of the image below are not Tibetan at all.
As a librarian and not as a scholar it is easy for me to go to a new library, appreciate the artistry and meaning that goes into each characteristic of a bibliographic item, and tender true interest in the hows and why of the library: I am inherently curious about other libraries and manuscript traditions. I regard broadening my horizons on trips like this as beneficial to the students I teach as I tell them about book culture around the world and for myself; undoubtedly each of us can learn something from another culture’s striving to protect and preserve their written heritage, especially when it is under attack by another country’s government like Tibet’s is under attack by China. Above all, however, I delight in exchanging some positive energy with a stranger so that we are connected in our similar pursuits if only for an afternoon. Thank you teachers, thank you ancestors, thank you Mr. Kalsang.
