National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

I was told that there was an inscribed stone in the village of dKor, below Poo, and
went to examine it. Although the stone was generally known, nobody, not even the
lamas, had tried to read it. The village of dKor is situated on the right bank of the
little brook of Poo. The stone was found in a field belonging to a lama called bKā-rgyud
It is about six feet high. The upper half of the sculpture shows a well executed repre-
sentation of a stūpa, the lower half that of a human being. This part of the stone is
in very bad preservation and most of it underground. The human figure wears a three-
pointed hat. On the reverse of the stone is a Tibetan inscription of eleven lines. Only
the first two lines are in fair preservation ; of all the other lines only the beginning and
end have been preserved, whilst the middle part of those lines has been obliterated.
While we were examining the stone, a Christian Tibetan who was with us, began to read
the first lines : dPal-lha-btsan-po-Lha-bla-ma-Ye-shes…………When he had got so far, I
suddenly remembered that I had heard of a person whose name began Lha-bla-ma-Ye-shes.
But what was the syllable following after Ye-shes? It suddenly flashed on me, that it
was 'od, and that Lha-bla-ma-Ye-shes-'od was the name of the royal priest, the early
king of Guge, who had tried in vain to draw the famous Buddhist monk Atīśa to his
kingdom. Did the inscription really contain his name— a name which has not yet been
traced anywhere? We all went close to the stone, and looked at it from all sides, even
from below. And lo, it was so. The stone contained the full name of this famous
personage of Tibetan history (c. 1025 A.D.) and the words following the name were
sku-ring-ta, meaning 'in his life time.' I was so overjoyed at the discovery of this
important record that I could not help jumping about in the field, and then embraced the
lama who was just on the point of becoming displeased with my treatment of his crop.

The story of King Ye-shes-'od is found in the second part of the Tibetan historical
work dPag-bsam-ljon-bzang, and a translation has been published by Sarat Chandra Das.¹
Up to the present, nobody had known whether the story contained in those works was
really true and whether the persons mentioned in it had actually lived or not. This in-
scription of King Ye-shes 'od is the first record which can be brought forward to confirm
the statements of the Tibetan historians. Fragmentary though it is, it contains some
interesting information. We learn from it that in the days of the priest-king Ye-shes-'od
the villages of sPu (Poo) and dKor both existed, that Poo even possessed a palace (pho-
brang). dKor is called dKor-khang, house of dKor. There were ten princes according
to the inscription, and all of them were sent to Poo. What was their object in this place,
cannot be said with perfect certainty, but from the frequent occurrence of the words lha-
chos (religion of the lha), and sngar-chos (former religion) it appears that they were sent
here for the propagation of Buddhism. In the end we read that they erected something.
This was probably the first Buddhist temple at Poo of which local tradition asserts that it
was erected in the place where now-a-days the inscribed stone is found. This site is lower
than most of the houses of Poo, and as an object of sanctity could not be suffered to stand
on a lower elevation than ordinary houses, a new temple was built higher up, in the
centre of Poo, and embellished with the furnishings of the old one.