[INDOLOGY] help with inscription

[Matthew Kapstein]

Dear friends,

I am wondering if some of those who are better paleographers than I might help me to read this. It comes from a Tibetan manuscript and so may not make coherent sense, as it is a Tibetan attempt to write Sanskrit.

[cid:c68dae3f-7da1-403b-b447-8d2da375970e]

What I see is:
na maḥ ka? chche? vi ja ya bhā? [or tā?] pā dā ya//

The three syllables marked with interrogation are the ones that are giving me trouble. It is a line of homage addressed perhaps to a teacher named lha mthong lo tsA ba bshes gnyen rnam rgyal, whose proper name, in a calque back translation into Sanskrit, would be
mitra-vijaya. His title lha mthong lo tsA ba ("translator from Lha mthong") would not normally be put into Sanskrit, but there's no fixed rule that it should not. However, the identification is not certain and, in any case, Tibetan teachers typically had several variant names.

thanks in advance for your suggestions,
Matthew

Matthew Kapstein
Directeur d'études,
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes

Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies,
The University of Chicago


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