A Look at the Margins: Autobiographical Writing in Tibetan in the People’s Republic of China

Abstract

The practice of writing one’s life was well rooted in pre-modern Tibet²: biographies (Tib. rnam-thar) and autobiographies (Tib. rang- rnam)³ of religious masters were, and still are, very popular readings, for monks as well as literate lay people. Some of these texts, written in prose, prose interspersed with verse, or entirely in verse, are even often read aloud because of the musicali ty of their composition The earliest known examples of autobiographical writing, only a few dozen folios long, date back to the twelfth century, but auto/biography as a historical and literary genre exploded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both in length and quantity.⁴ This was a pivotal historical period, which saw the emergence and consolidation, in Central Tibet, of the regime of the Dalai Lamas, and, in outer Tibetan regions, of large monastic centres. There are at least 150 book-length autobiographical texts that are accessible today,⁵ most of which contain several hundred folios

Although one’s corpse goes under the earth, One’s story remains above

(Tibetan proverb)