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Still
used today, the Tibetan script resembles the Kashmirian
forms of the great treasure store of Indian syllabaries.
The history of such ancient writings and
of the evolution of the early alphabets is very
extensive.
To
house the first Tibetan library, King Sron Tsan
Gampo, who reigned in the seventh century A.D.,
began the construction of the Potala, a hilltop
collection of buildings, including a Buddhist abbey
that over the centuries came to resemble a fortress.
It overlooks the city of Lhasa, which he
made his capital. Buddhism became such an integral part of Tibetan
culture that the Potala was regarded as the “Abode
of the Buddha,” or Buddhaalaya, from which name the word Bodala
or Potala is said to derive.
It is vital that the manuscripts surviving
in those few old libraries be preserved and studied.
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J.K
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Next
came a doctor who claimed to have cured many sick people,
many of them without asking fees, he said.
However, it was revealed that he had postponed
administering the right medicine to a rich man in order
to prolong the illness and raise the fee for curing his
patient.
This
abject deceit was considered a grave sin for a physician,
so he was sentenced, for his greed, to suffering the scourge
for a set time, until his sins were purified. After that, he would be released and sent on the golden path upward.
When
finally my turn came, the judge stared at me, then told
the deer-head man to study his book.
Finally, King Shosgyal spoke: “Your time on the
earth is not yet fulfilled. There has been an error in your name and surname, so you have been
brought here erroneously.
Your
body [the literal translation of this word would be ‘soul-wrap’]
is still resting on your bed; we have no record yet of
your deeds, good or bad. So you now will be sent back to earth to live
out your life; thus, you can tell your contemporaries
how the dead are judged.
You have seen that virtue is useful and that sin
is harmful.”
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