Tibetan — The Tibetologist

The Tibetologist — the Land of Snows from Dunhuang documents to the complete Derge canon.

The Tibetan desk opens with the canon whole: the Public-Domain Digital Derge Kangyur and Tengyur (Esukhia’s exact-representation of the woodblocks, Toh numbers as the crosswalk key), 84000’s English translation layer, OTDO’s Old Tibetan documents, and the gold-annotation lane (SOAS POS, the Annals and Chronicle); the lexicon shelves join as their packets land.

The desk opens with the complete canon: the Digital Derge Kangyur (103 volumes, Toh 1–1108) and Tengyur (213 volumes, Toh 1109–4569) — Esukhia’s Public-Domain exact-representation of the Derge woodblocks, carved mistakes and archaic spellings preserved, every passage cited by folio and line. Tohoku numbers are the documents’ names (urn:nabu:derge-kangyur:toh846), the crosswalk key shared with 84000, rKTs and the catalog literature.

New here? The Quickstart sets up the library in minutes.

The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these twelve answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Source	Holds	License	Status	Holdings (as of 19 September 2026)
`e84000`	texts	nc	wired · manual	388 docs / 124,223 passages
`otdo`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	413 docs / 13,593 passages
`soas-tibetan`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	4 docs / 991 passages
`old-tibetan`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	3 docs / 2,669 passages
`derge-kangyur`	texts	open	wired · manual	1,198 docs / 458,972 passages
`actib`	feature module	attribution	wired · manual	nothing held yet
`derge-tengyur`	texts	open	wired · manual	3,362 docs / 897,142 passages
`mvp`	dictionary	open	wired · manual	9,379 entries
`tibetan-verbs`	dictionary	open	wired · manual	2,491 entries
`monlam-lexicon`	dictionary	attribution	wired · manual	449,829 entries
`wiktionary-bo`	dictionary	attribution	wired · manual	3,651 entries
`nabu-data`	feature module	attribution	wired · manual	nothing held yet

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 19 September 2026): bod 455,971 · san 9,379 · xct 4,564 · otb 410 · en 388 · xzh 5 · eng 1.

The desk’s instruments

The Toh crosswalk: every text is its Tohoku number (toh1, toh1-1 subindexes, toh846a Tohoku-gap texts) — the join key for translations, catalogs and parallel corpora as they land.
Exact-representation reading: the woodblocks’ own readings stay in the text; the proofreaders’ (error,correction) suggestions, archaic/modern pairs and error candidates ride each passage’s apparatus annotations.
Syllables, not words: tsheg-delimited text is stored verbatim — word segmentation is enrichment-land, not parse.

Working the tibetan desk

The generic axis surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable tibetan               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync tibetan                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis tibetan          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis tibetan                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis tibetan   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

Terminal setup

Tibetan script (xct): dbu-can needs stacked-consonant rendering — install font-noto-serif-tibetan (or Noto Sans Tibetan) and let the terminal take its non-ASCII slot from it. Text is stored decomposed (NFD ≡ NFC for Tibetan); no special handling needed beyond the font.

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the twenty-five research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.