Dear Peter,
As far as I know, nothing came of this nomination. Possibly this is because the manuscript broke in half, as you noted. Several years ago my friend Robert Hutwohl found this 2006 blog post giving a little more information about this situation:
So the breakage occurred no later than 2006, while the UNESCO nomination occurred in 2010 or 2011.
I do not know of any color images of it being available.
Certainly, the Asiatic Society of Bengal's not allowing access to it any more would be all the more reason to have it photographed in color and high resolution and made available.
In 1982, before it broke, I was able to purchase from the ASB library a microfilm of this manuscript. The microfilm is not in color, and it is not high resolution. But under the circumstances, it may provide the only access to this important manuscript that is now possible. If I knew of a good way to digitize this microfilm, I would do so.
The editors of the Vimalaprabhā
edition published from Sarnath of course also had a microfilm of this manuscript, and this microfilm is no doubt still at Sarnath. I do not know if it is any better than my microfilm or not. There is the question of how fully this edition reports the readings of this manuscript (ms. ca). Jagannatha Upadhyaya, when speaking of the fifth chapter, told me in 1982 that he could not read this manuscript. As you know, it is written in Old Bengali script. Banarsi Lal told me in 1998 at Sarnath that it was Janardan Pandey who deciphered this manuscript for vol. 3 of their edition, 1994, containing the fifth chapter
The
Vimalaprabhā manuscript that was reproduced by Lokesh Chandra in his 2010 publication, Sanskrit Manuscripts from Tibet, is written in the same Old Bengali script, and is apparently of about the same age. The big difference is that it lacks the fifth chapter. It probably originally had it, but the manuscript now ends on the leaf immediately before the fifth chapter would have begun, so the very ending of chapter four is also missing in this manuscript. There seems to have occurred some prohibition of chapter 5 early on. No later manuscripts have it, and this manuscript provides indirect evidence that it was removed from earlier manuscripts that did have it. Note that the unnumbered folio sides are given out of order in this 2010 publication.
This 2010 publication does not give information about where this manuscript came from. I asked Lokesh Chandra about it, and he wrote in reply on June 11, 2016:
"I published the Vimalaprabha
manuscript as I got it from a Tibetan lama. It was returned to him after
publication. I have no details about his whereabouts or even his name. The
monastery of its origin is also unknown."
There is one more
Vimalaprabhā
manuscript that has the fifth chapter. It was described by Hara Prasad Shastri in "Notes on Palm-leaf MSS. in the Library of His Excellency the Mahārāja of Nepāl," Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 66, 1897, pp. 310-316, this manuscript on pp. 315-316. The colophon that he quotes shows that it has the fifth chapter. He reports that it is illustrated. This manuscript was held in the Durbar Library, Kathmandu. It was borrowed by Giuseppe Tucci. It apparently ended up in a vault in Italy. Francesco Sferra reports that all efforts to get information about it and other manuscripts from Tucci's widow have failed. We can only hope that it will be found and donated to some museum in Italy by Tucci's heirs, as was another manuscript by Tucci's widow that Tucci had borrowed.
Best regards,
David Reigle
Colorado, U.S.A.