Bruno Lainé studied Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the university of Vienna, where he worked with Prof. Tauscher on Tibetan canonical manuscripts. Together, they crisscrossed the Tibetan cultural area in northern India in search of handwritten Kanjurs but also any other form of canonical manuscripts. They discovered a new Kanjur group, the Mustang group, which provides insight into canonical literary activity in the southern and western regions of the Tibetan area. Among the Kanjurs of the Mustang group, we must count the collections of Basgo, Hemis (Ladakh) as well as those of Namgyal or Lang (Dolpo in Nepal).
Presently, Bruno Lainé is part of a project labelled “Himalayan Sūtra Collections: Textual, Material, and Social Perspectives” at the University of Vienna. The project is part of a long-term research initiative under the label “Tibetan Manuscript Project Vienna” (TMPV), which aims to document, preserve, and research endangered manuscript collections of Tibetan canonical literature in the Himalayan borderlands. The particular focus of the current research phase is on so-called “Sūtra collections” which represent a model of canonical collection that precedes the more commonly known later “mainstream Kanjurs,” and differs from the latter not only in structural organization but also regarding textual contents.
The main aim of the project is to secure the manuscript collections through digitization and to make the respective images and catalogue data openly accessible within the Vienna-based “Resources for Kanjur & Tanjur Studies” (rKTs) database.
Bruno Lainé has set up the Resources for Kanjur & Tanjur Studies (rKTs) site (www.rkts.org) which became the reference for navigation in the Tibetan canon and for the study of these texts.
rKTs is dedicated to making research on Tibetan Buddhist canonical collections openly accessible. The website provides comprehensive tools for studying canonical literature in more than 100 Kanjurs, Tanjurs, Tantra collections, and other collections of canonical literature. These include online catalogues, searchable e-texts, and an extensive archive of images of Tibetan manuscripts as well as secondary sources.