Tibetan བསྟན་འགྱུར Traditional Chinese 丹珠爾 Hanyu Pinyin | Wylie bstan 'gyur Simplified Chinese 丹珠尔 | |
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The Tengyur or Tanjur or Bstan-’gyur (Tibetan: "Translation of Teachings") is the Tibetan collection of commentaries to the Buddhist teachings, or "Translated Treatises".
Contents
The Buddhist Canon
To the Tengyur were assigned commentaries to both Sutras and Tantras, treatises and abhidharma works (both Mahayana and non-Mahayana).
Together with the 108-volume Kangyur (the Collection of the Words of the Buddha), these form the basis of the Tibetan Buddhist canon. "The Kangyur usually takes up a hundred or a hundred and eight volumes, the Tengyur two hundred and twenty-five, and the two together contain 4,569 works."
As example, the content of the Beijing Tengyur:
- Prajnaparamita Commentaries, 16 Volumes.
- Madhyamika Treatises, 29 Volumes.
- Yogacara Treatises, 29 Volumes.
- Abhidharma, 8 Volumes.
- Miscellaneous Texts, 4 Volumes.
- Vinaya Commentaries, 16 Volumes.
- Tales and Dramas, 4 Volumes.
- Technical Treatises, 43 Volumes.
The Bön Tengyur
The Tibetan Bön religion, under the influence of Buddhism, also has its canon literature divided into two sections called the Kangyur and Tengyur but the number and contents of the collection are not yet fully known. Apparently, Bön began to take more on a literary form about the time Buddhism began to enter Tibet, although it could have had some written register some time before that.