185
The quality of its paper suggests a work from the Tibetan or post-Tibetan occupation of Dunhuang. The manuscript comprises: the end of Chapter 25 (columns 1 to 5) on omens drawn from howling dogs; Chapter 26 (columns 6 to 22) which deals mainly with omens drawn from canine excrement and the beginning of Chapter 27 (columns 23 to 27) on sounds produced by the ghosts of dead soldiers.
But before embarking on a study of the manuscript itself a few words must be said about Chinese divination in general and the restrictions placed on oracular material in Tang and Song times.
According to the Tang Code of Law, ownership by private individuals of astronomical charts and instruments, of divination diagrams and oracular works, carried a penalty of two years of corvée1. That local authorities in Dunhuang were conversant with the law is shown by an incomplete copy of the Tanglü Shuyi, in the Pelliot collection, in which both the crime and its punishment are specifically mentioned. But Dunhuang was an outpost in the far Northwest of China and disregard of the law in such a remote place may have been easier than at the capital.
There may also be another explanation for the fairly large number of astronomical and oracular texts among the Dunhuang manuscripts. From 781 to 848 the city was occupied by the Tibetans and thus not under Chinese jurisdiction. Quite possibly, the ban on private ownership of oracular works, if not actually lifted, was allowed to lapse, which may have encouraged Chinese scribes to increase their output. Divination methods were not only copied from existing Chinese sources; efforts were also made to adapt alien omen lore. Often such efforts were limited to the insertion of cyclical characters into a foreign system but, at times, and for reasons that escape us, totally irrelevant material was also included in these adaptations. The resulting manuscripts, though puzzling, are extremely interesting. Where a number of manuscripts on the same subject have survived it is sometimes possible to trace the source of extraneous material by comparing different versions of the same text. But, as we have seen, there is no other manuscript on dog divination in the Dunhuang