Tibetan Inscriptions


Book Description

Inscriptions are a rather neglected field within Tibetan Studies, because they are often located in places that are not easily accessible for both geographical and political reasons. It is thus especially welcome that two of the contributions to this volume deal with inscriptions documented on recent field trips to Tibet: Benjamin Wood discusses an inscription in Zha lu that relates an enigmatic conflict in the history of the monastery, and Kurt Tropper looks into an epigraphic cycle on the life of the Buddha in Tsaparang. Moreover, Nathan Hill provides a new interpretation of the beginning of the famous Rkong po inscription, and Kunsang Namgyal Lama surveys the various kinds of texts found on tsha tshas. An extra level of reflection is added to the volume by Cristina Scherrer-Schaub’s methodological considerations on the classification and interpretation of inscriptions.




A Corpus of Early Tibetan Inscriptions


Book Description

Published in the year 2000, A Corpus of Early Tibetan Inscriptions is a valuable contribution to he field of Asian Studies.




Compounds and Compounding in Old Tibetan. Vol. 1


Book Description

Old Tibetan documents are the oldest extant monuments of the Tibetan language. Their exploration, although successfully flourishing in the last two decades, has been considerably impeded by often unintelligible and obsolete vocabulary that was bound to the particular cultural and political context of the Tibetan Empire that collapsed in the 840s CE. The present publication aims at clarifying a part of this vocabulary by examining nearly 400 Old Tibetan compounds. In Part I an attempt has been undertaken to define a compound and to provide the first linguistic classification of Old Tibetan compounds. Part II concentrates on a lexicological analysis of the compounds and strives to explain their etymology, word-formation, and usage in Old Tibetan. Contents of Volume 1: Introduction, Indices, References, Part I: Compounding in Old Tibetan, Part II: Old Tibetan Compounds. Lexicological Analysis. Lexemes 1-119




Drawn and Written in Stone


Book Description

Drawn and Written in Stone' explores the religious history of the highest part of the Tibetan Plateau through its rock art and inscriptions. It is focused on facsimiles of ritual and ceremonial monuments carved and painted on stone surfaces together with rock inscriptions in the Tibetan language, vital archaeological and historical materials for appraising the development of religion in Tibet, ca. 100 BCE to 1400 CE. By probing the complexion of figures and letters in stone, this work considers how early cult traditions contributed to the establishment of Tibetan Buddhism and a rival faith known as Yungdrung Bon. Outside of the Indian cultural context, relatively little has been written about the historical antecedents of these popular Tibetan religions for a want of sources. This monograph helps remedy this large gap in Tibetan studies by drawing upon the author?s surveys of rock art and rock inscriptions conducted in upmost Tibet between 1995 and 2013.




Framing Intellectual and Lived Spaces in Early South Asia


Book Description

The contributions to this book address a series of ‘confrontations’—debates between intellectual communities, the interplay of texts and images, and the intersection of monumental architecture and physical terrain—and explore the ways in which the legacy of these encounters, and the human responses to them, conditioned cultural production in early South Asia (c. 4th-7th centuries CE). Rather than an agonistic term, the book uses ‘confrontation’ as a heuristic to examine historical moments within this pivotal period in which individuals and communities were confronted with new ideas and material expressions. The first half of the volume addresses the intersections of textual, material, and visual forms of cultural production by focusing on three primary modes of confrontation: the relation of inscribed texts to material media, the visual articulation of literary images and, finally, the literary interpretation and reception of built landscapes. The second part of the volume focuses on confrontations both within and between intellectual communities. The articles address the dynamics between peripheral and dominant movements in the history of Indian philosophy.




The Tibetan History Reader


Book Description

Answering a critical need for an accurate, in-depth history of Tibet, this single-volume resource reproduces essential, hard-to-find essays from the past fifty years of Tibetan studies. Covering the social, cultural, and political development of Tibet from the seventh century to the modern period, the volume is organized chronologically and regionally to complement courses in Asian and religious studies and world civilizations. Beginning with Tibet's emergence as a regional power and concluding with its profound contemporary transformations, this anthology offers both a general and ..




Tibetan Printing: Comparison, Continuities, and Change


Book Description

In Tibetan Printing: Comparisons, Continuities and Change the editors publish the results of the workshop “Printing as an Agent of Change in Tibet and beyond” held at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in November 2013. This is the first study of the social and cultural history of Tibetan book technology that takes materials, living traditions and cross-cultural comparisons into consideration. Bringing together leading experts from different disciplines, it discusses the introduction of printing in Tibetan societies in the context of Asian book cultures with an eye to the questions raised by the study of the European history of printing. This title is available online in its entirety in Open Access. Contributors are: Tim Barrett, Alessandro Boesi, Peter Burke, Michela Clemente, Hildegard Diemberger, Dorje Gyeltsen, Franz-Karl Ehrhard, Helmut Eimer, Johan Elverskog, Camillo Formigatti, Imre Galambos, Agnieszka Helman-Wazny, Tomasz Wazny, Sherab Sangpo Kawa, Peter Kornicki, Leonard van der Kuijp, Stefan Larsson, Ben Nourse, Anuradha Pallipurath, Porong Dawa, Paola Ricciardi, Tsering Dawa Sharshon, Sam van Schaik, Cristina Scherrer-Schaub, Marta Sernesi, Pasang Wangdu.




Tibetan Histories


Book Description

Over 700 items are featured in this bibliography which attempts to provide a comprehensive listing in chronological sequence of Tibetan-language works belonging to the typical historical genres that have evolved between the 11th century and the present. As well as dates and details of composition or publication, authorship and title, there are also references to the secondary literature in other languages.




The Classical Tibetan Language


Book Description

Among Asian languages, Tibetan is second only to Chinese in the depth of its historical record, with texts dating back as far as the eighth and ninth centuries, written in an alphabetic script that preserves the contemporaneous phonological features of the language. The Classical Tibetan Language is the first comprehensive description of the Tibetan language and is distinctive in that it treats the classical Tibetan language on its own terms rather than by means of descriptive categories appropriate to other languages, as has traditionally been the case. Beyer presents the language as a medium of literary expression with great range, power, subtlety, and humor, not as an abstract object. He also deals comprehensively with a wide variety of linguistic phenomena as they are actually encountered in the classical texts, with numerous examples of idioms, common locutions, translation devices, neologisms, and dialectal variations.




Sino-Tibetan Buddhism across the Ages


Book Description

Sino-Tibetan Buddhism implies cross-cultural contacts and exchanges between China and Tibet. The ten case-studies collected in this book focus on the spread of Chinese Buddhism within a mainly Tibetan environment and the adaptation of Tibetan Buddhism among a Chinese-speaking audience throughout the ages.




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