MIASU Research Seminar – 27 January – Christian Luczanits

Researching Monastery Collections in Mustang: Background, Procedures and Discoveries

Christian Luczanits (SOAS, London)

In this presentation, I will first introduce the background of my project, Tibetan Buddhist Monastery Collections Today, and provide an overview of its achievements since 2012. I then discuss the procedures involved in documentation, conceptually, technically, and practically. Finally, I reflect on the research into the documented objects and the discoveries made.Thereby, continuous documentation results in the continuous refinement of our knowledge of those objects, but the volume of documentation also complicates research considerably. I will demonstrate this with manuscript illuminations dating from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries and sculptures from the height of the Mustang kingdom in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.