Re-examination of Tangut fragment Or. 12380/3495 from the Collection of the British Library

Abstract

Although there have been several studies on the Tangut fragment with Tibetan phonetic glosses, Or. 12380/3495, which is now preserved at the British Library, some questions concerning it remain unsolved. This paper first provides a brief account of the fragment. Then it examines the damaged Tibetan writing with uncertain meaning on the top left corner of the fragment, and proposes that this Tibetan writing is in fact a phonetic gloss of the first five Tangut characters of line 5 in the Tangut text. This paper also provides a comprehensive collation of the fragment, and suggests that the source of the Tangut text should be belonging to the cult of the Thirty-five Buddhas.