Some decades ago it was common to s

Some decades ago it was common to speak rather dismissively of this history, with its primary emphasis on developments relative to Buddhism and not so much on the royal house and military — the things that so many unfortunately regard as the flesh and bones of history — as having been redacted in the 12th or 13th centuries. Certainly the variations in the text tell us it had a rather tortuous transmission, and for any text that old alterations in the course of recopying are inevitable, but that hardly means it can be ignored as insignificant. In very recent times its stock has risen sharply, since a fragment was identified among the Dunhuang documents.