རེག་ཟིག། / reg zig

The term reg zig (also reg zeg and reg zin) seems to be an old one. It is, for example, attested once in Pelliot tibétain 1111 (OTDO) and also in the colophon of the Madhyavyutpatti (aka the sGra sbyor bam po gnyis pa). See, for example, gNya’-gong dKon-mchog-tshe-brtan, brDa rnying yig cha’i tshig don kun khrol. Lanzhou: Kan-su’u-mi-rigs-dpe-dkrun-khang, 2010, p. 200.  According to the Tshig mdzod chen mo (s.vv. reg zig, reg zin, zin thun), reg zig or reg zin is supposed to be “notes” (zin bris = zin thun =  brjed byang) (i.e. Krang-dbyi-sun et al., Bod rgya tshig mdzod chen mo. Beijing: Mi-rigs-dpe-skrun-khang, 1993). But as is often the case in Tibetan sources, dpe cha (or yig cha) as an “abstract” text or work, for example, is conflated with dpe cha in the sense of a “concrete” (physical) book. It is for the same reason why it is not quite easy to decide whether a certain term is a name of a literary genre or name of a physical book. In Pad-ma-bkra-shis’s Bod yig gna’ dpe (p. 33), the word reg zeg (which is how the word is spelled there) seems to refer to the physical book, for it talks about reg zeg sngon po (“Blue Notes”) and reg zeg sngo dmar gnyis (“Two Notes: Blue and Red”). But here, we shall treat reg zig as a name of a genre insofar as it is equated with zin bris and brjed byang and explain it as a type of literary work that does not claim to have higher literary style and standard but one that constitutes of “notes” or “remarks” or “afterword” about a certain topic. The word reg zig and its orthographic variants seems to have become obsolete and have been apparently replaced by brjed byang, zin bris, and zin thun.