The Tibetan Buddhist flood story of the first humans

Record summary

Nineteenth-century travellers and scholars reported Tibetan Buddhist cosmological traditions concerning cycles of destruction, renewal, and the emergence of human communities. Some later comparative works grouped these materials with flood traditions, although the reports do not always describe a discrete deluge or preserve a stable Tibetan title. This lead is therefore best used to investigate transmission through colonial ethnography, translation, and Buddhist textual study rather than as a confirmed single legend. Researchers should identify the original Tibetan source behind each nineteenth-century report.