Zhangzhung (Tibetan:ཞང་ཞུང་,Wylie:zhang zhung) is anextinctSino-Tibetan language that was spoken inZhangzhung in what is now westernTibet. It is attested in a bilingual text calledA Cavern of Treasures (mDzod phug) and several shorter texts.
A small number of documents preserved inDunhuang contain an undeciphered language that has been calledOld Zhangzhung, but the identification is controversial.
A Cavern of Treasures (Tibetan:མཛོད་ཕུག་,Wylie:mdzod phug) is aterma uncovered by Shenchen Luga (Tibetan:གཤེན་ཆེན་ཀླུ་དགའ་,Wylie:gshen chen klu dga') in the early eleventh century.[2] Martin identifies the importance of this scripture for studies of the Zhangzhung language:
For students of Tibetan culture in general, themDzod phug is one of the most intriguing of all Bön scriptures, since it is the only lengthy bilingual work in Zhang-zhung and Tibetan (some of the shorter but still significant sources for Zhang-zhung are signalled in Orofino 1990)."[3]
Bradley (2002) says Zhangzhung "is now agreed" to have been a Kanauri orWest Himalayish language.Guillaume Jacques (2009) rebuts earlier hypotheses that Zhangzhung might have originated in eastern (rather than western) Tibet by having determined it to be a non-Qiangic language.[4]
Widmer (2014) classifies Zhangzhung within the eastern branch of West Himalayish, and lists the following cognates between Zhangzhung and Proto-West Himalayish.[5]
F. W. Thomas suggested that three undecipheredDunhuang manuscripts in a Tibetan script were written in an older form of the Zhangzhung language.[8][9] This identification has been accepted by Takeuchi Tsuguhito (武内紹人), who called the language "Old Zhangzhung" and added two further manuscripts.[10]Two of these manuscripts are in the Stein collection of theBritish Library (IOL Tib J 755 (Ch. Fragment 43) and Or.8212/188) and three in the Pelliot collection of theBibliothèque Nationale (Pelliot tibétain 1247, 1251 and 1252). In each case, the relevant text is written on the reverse side of a scroll containing an earlier Chinese Buddhist text.[10]The texts are written in a style of Tibetan script dating from the late 8th or early 9th centuries.Takeuchi and Nishida claim to have partially deciphered the documents, which they believe to be separate medical texts.[11]However,David Snellgrove, and more recently Dan Martin, have rejected Thomas's identification of the language of these texts as a variant of Zhangzhung.[12][13]
^Berzin, Alexander (2005).The Four Immeasurable Attitudes in Hinayana, Mahayana, and Bön. Study Buddhism. Source:[1] (accessed: June 6, 2016)
^Martin, Dan (2000). "Comparing Treasuries: Mental states and othermdzod phug lists and passages with parallels in Abhidharma works of Vasubandhu and Asanga, or in Prajnaparamita Sutras: A progress report". In Karmay, S.G.; Nagano, Y. (eds.).New Horizons in Bon Studies. Senri Ethnological Reports. Vol. 15. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology. pp. 21–88.doi:10.15021/00002197. p. 21.
^Jacques, Guillaume (2009)."Zhangzhung and Qiangic Languages". In Yasuhiko Nagano (ed.).Issues in Tibeto-Burman Historical Linguistics (PDF). Senri Ethnological Studies. Vol. 75. pp. 121–130.
^Widmer, Manuel. 2014. "A tentative classification of West Himalayish." InA descriptive grammar of Bunan, 33–56. Bern: University of Bern.
^Thomas, F. W. (1933). "The Z̀aṅ-z̀uṅ language".The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.65 (2):405–410.doi:10.1017/S0035869X00074943.JSTOR25194777.
^Takeuchi, Tsuguhito; Nishida, Ai (2009)."The Present Stage of Deciphering Old Zhangzhung". In Nagano, Yasuhiko (ed.).Issues in Tibeto-Burman Historical Linguistics (PDF). Senri Ethnological Studies. Vol. 75. pp. 151–165.
^Snellgrove, David L. (1959). "Review of Giuseppe Tucci,Preliminary Report on Two Scientific Expeditions in Nepal, Serie Orientale Roma no. 10, Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente (Rome 1956)".Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.22 (2):377–378.doi:10.1017/S0041977X00068944.JSTOR609450.S2CID190715371.
Haarh, Erik. The Zhang-zhung Language: A Grammar and Dictionary of the Unexplored Language of the Tibetan Bönpos. Universitetsforlaget i Aarhus og Munksgaard, 1968.
Hummel, Seigbert and Guido Vogliotti, ed. and trans. On Zhang-zhung. Dharamsala: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 2000.
Namgyal Nyima Dagkar. "Concise Analysis of Zhang Zhung Terms in the Documents of Dunhuang." In Tibet, Past and Present: Tibetan Studies I, edited by Henk Blezer, Proceedings of the Ninth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Leiden 2000, vol. 1, pp. 429–439. Leiden: Brill, 2002.
Namgyal Nyima (Rnam rgyal nyi ma). Zhang-zhung – Tibetan – English Contextual Dictionary. Berlin, 2003. Description: This new dictionary of Zhangzhung terminology from the Bön tradition of Tibetan religion includes 3875 entries drawn from 468 sources. These entries include Tibetan and English definitions as well as the citation of passages in which they occur with full bibliographical information for these passages.
