These come mainly from two corpora. The first is the well-known cache of manuscripts found in Dunhuang in the early twentieth century, the majority of which are now held in Paris and London. The second is a collection of just four texts found in the 1990s in a large stūpa called Gathang Bumpa (dga’ thang ’bum pa) in southern Tibet. At the time of writing, it has been reported that further texts from this same repository are currently being prepared for publication. The Dunhuang texts, of which only a few are relevant to our purposes, date from the seventh to the early eleventh centuries, while the Gathang collection probably dates from the tenth or the eleventh century.

In 2005, Tibetan media in China announced the discovery of several caches of manuscripts, reportedly dating from the Tibetan imperial period, in private houses in a remote part of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands. This media attention followed the publication, in that same year, of an article by the scholar Ngawang Gyatso (ngag dbang rgya mtsho), which contained sensational information about a local tradition of lay priests called leu (le’u) in the Min mountain range (Minshan 岷山) on the northeastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, along the border between Gansu and Sichuan provinces.

A local official named Drukthar (’brug thar), who had developed an interest in this obscure local tradition, obtained a substantial allocation from the Gansu provincial authorities to produce a lavish thirty-volume collection of manuscript facsimiles in 2011. This first set of facsimiles was followed by the publication of further collections: a sixty-volume set of Leu texts also edited by Drukthar in 2013; a ten-volume collection edited by Tsering Thar (tshe ring thar) and Ngawang Gyatso in 2016; and a hundred-volume collection edited by Luosai, Liang Jixiao, and Quan Yongkang, published in four instalments—volumes 1–25 in 2018, volumes 26–50 in 2020, volumes 51–75 in 2021, and volumes 76–100 in 2024. The individual volumes range in size from 150 to around 300 pages of facsimile reproductions, and together these collections encompass an estimated 35,000 folios. Further publications are currently in preparation.

These four collections will be identified as follows: Leu 2011-30; Leu 2013-60; Leu 2016-10; and Leu 2024-100. At the time of writing, only the first three collections in their entirety, as well as the contents pages of volumes 26–75 of the fourth collection, are available to us. Leu 2011-30 and Leu 2013-60 include no tables of contents, but lists of the texts contained in each have been compiled by Naljor Tsering (rnal ’byor tshe ring), a member of the project. The tally of texts identified in each collection is as follows:

Leu 2011-30: 640

Leu 2013-60: 764

Leu 2016-10: 90

Leu 2024-100, vols. 26–75: 589

This brings the total number of identified texts to 2,083. However, if we assume that the first and last quarters of Leu 2024-100 contain a similar number of texts (589) to those for which we have content pages, and double that figure, the overall number of texts across the four collections would rise to 2,872. Even if a certain number of these texts are “impostors,” included either as a result of indiscriminate acquisition by the compilers of the volumes or through the insertion of Yungdrung Bön texts by missionary monks into the repertoires of Leu priests, we are still left with a very substantial body of texts that will increase even further as new collections are published.

Another, much smaller but nevertheless important, recently discovered collection that will be considered along with the Leu volumes is a collection of ritual texts of the Baima, a population inhabiting the Sichuan-Gansu borderlands. Although the Baima speak a Qiangic language, they are officially grouped within the Tibetan minority nationality, and their rituals texts are in Tibetan. The language of these texts, the topics of the rituals and the codicological features of the manuscripts are very similar to those of the Leu. Before the inception of the project, 388 folios of these manuscripts had been photographed by one of the project members, Valentina Punzi. Since then, several thousand more previously undocumented folios of Baima ritual texts have come to light, and have been made available to the project. While the Leu priesthood is in decline, the ritual tradition of the Baima, whose priests are known as bonpo, remains quite vital since it forms a component in the group’s auto-definition of its ethnic identity.

Since the inception of the project, two volumes of facsimiles of manuscripts belonging to the Pumi people of Yunnan have become available to us. The two volumes, which were published in 2019, contain images of over 600 folios of ritual texts and myths that exhibit clear similarities with those of the Le’u and the Baima:

Hu Zhongwen and Hu Wenming (editors-in-chief) 2019. Yúnnún shǎoshù mínzú gǔjí zhēnběn jíchéng: Pǔmǐ zú hán guī bǎodiǎn (A Collection of Rare Ancient Books of Yunnan’s Ethnic Minorities: Pumi Ritual Texts), 2 vols. Shēng shǎoshù mínzú gǔjí zhěnglǐ chūbǎn guīhuà bàngōngshì yúnnán shěng mínzú xuéhuì pǔmǐ zú yánjiū wěiyuánhuì. (Yunnan Ethnic Minority Ancient Books Compilation and Publication Planning Office, Yunnan Ethnology Society Pumi Research Committee.)

Among the different schemes the Bon religion uses to classify its doctrines is a system known as the “Four Portals and the Treasury, the Fifth”. One of the “portals”, known as Black Water (chab nag), is a repository of Pagan myths and rituals. Many texts in this category are contained in the Bön Canon. To these we may add the compendia of ritual texts used by Bönpo village lamas in areas of the Himalayas, mainly Mustang and Dolpo (Nepal). Several of these, amounting to some three thousand folios, have been photographed by project members in the course of previous field research. These canonical works, which we refer to collectively as Black Water, reveal important traces of Pagan religion, even if those contained in the Bön Canon have clearly been sanitised to conform to doctrinal orthodoxy.