A Lamp Which Illuminates the Origin of the Sovereign and the Subject
༄༅། །རྗེ་འབངས་ཀྱི་འབྱུང་ཁུངས་གསལ་བའི་སྒྲོན་མེ་ཞེས་བྱ་བ་བཞུགས་སོ།།
A Lamp Which Illuminates the Origin of the Sovereign and the Subject
This manuscript was first e-published in 2018 by the Centre for Bhutan Studies for wider circlation and dissemination to the Bhutanese readers.
Publisher’s Note
The Centre for Bhutan Studies got hold of this manuscript rje ’bangs kyi ’byung khungs gsal ba’i sgron me zhes bya ba bzhugs so//for two days, after which it had to be returned to the owner. Translated as A lamp which illuminates the origin of the sovereign and the subjects, the manuscript was in possession of Chi mung kho che, the name of a nobility in eastern and central Bhutan. The Centre came to know about the manuscript’s whereabouts from Pema Gyalpo, himself a descendant of Chi mung kho chew, while interviewing about this nobility. His sibling Bumchu Wangdi, who was then taking care of the manuscript, agreed to borrow it to the Centre on the condition that the property will not be misused, including its reproduction for profit.
Consisting of 42 folios (excluding the title, folio), the manuscript, according to the owner, was restored to the family only recently by the late Dasho Tenzin Dorji, a former civil servant and a well-known traditional Bhutanese scholar. In Bhutan – The Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom(1979), Michael Aris mentions receiving the manuscript (54 folios) from Dasho Tenzin Dorji. Aris published the Wylie transliteration of the manuscript and the English rendering in Sources for the History of Bhutan(Wien: Universität Wien, 1986): Sa skyong rgyal po’i gdung rabs ’byung khungs dang ’bangs kyi mi rabs chad tshul nges par gsal bai sgron me, which he translates as The lamp which illuminates with certainty the origins of generations of ‘earth-protecting’ kings and the manner in which generations of subjects came into being(pp. 11-67). Both the texts are similar with some variations of orthography, colophons, titles and folio numbers, suggesting that they may have been different versions.
The Centre decided to e-publish the manuscript, because first, it is one of the few original sources of early Bhutanese history, above all on eastern and central Bhutan. Second, Aris’s Wylie transliteration and English translation is not available to the Bhutanese public, and we hope that making it available online will fill in the gap.