Two Illuminated Text Collections of Namgyal Monastery

Namgyal Monastery lies at an altitude of 3,850 meters, on a hill west of Lo Montang, the old capital of the Mustang kingdom, a very remote region in the Nepalese-Tibetan borderlands. While its foundation goes back to earlier times, its fifteenth-century enlargement established it as a thriving Buddhist institution providing a home to a huge number of monks and a remarkable collection of Buddhist material culture including statues, thangkas, and manuscripts. Among these various sacred objects, two collections of Buddhist canonical literature stand out for their age and complex illumination programmes. This book presents the visual and textual contents of these two sets of Buddhist manuscripts and analyses them from the perspectives of manuscript studies, art history, and textual analysis.