Ms. Mengyan Li, my doctoral
student, and I have encountered an expression gser phye long mo gang in the Phur
pa chos ’byung she is studying. From the context it is absolutely clear
that long mo must be a unit of measurement,
that is, something like bre. This is,
of course, assuming that there is no scribal or transmissional error. To be
sure, there is no Varia lectio. The
reading long mo in the sense of anklebone
seems to make no sense. I think long mo
gang cannot be equal to bre gang.
gNyags was undergoing hard times then and he was not rich. We tried to look for
this word elsewhere but it seems to be what is called a Hapax legomenon. I suspect that long
mo gang should mean something like spar
gang or khyor gang but there is
no way that we can verify or falsify.
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