Tibetan Studies [antikvár]

PREFACETibetan Studies contains in one volume all articles by Alexander Csoma de Kőrös published by the Asiatic Society of Bengal. This renowned scientific society as is well-known played a great part in the life of the author, who spent most of his time in India at this institute.Csoma was born in 1784, the year the society was founded; its first scholarly publication, the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, started up in 1832, and Csoma's very first published article appeared in this volume.Besides his three big monographs, the Tibetan English Dictionary, the Tibetan Grarrvmar and the Sanskrit-Tibetan-English Vocabulary which appeared posthumously the founder of Tibetology published several articles. The majority of these appeared in the above-mentioned Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal between 1832 and 1840, and so did his Subhdsitaratnanidhi, posthumously, in 185556. All of them were published again in 1911, in the special issue of the Journal edited by E. Denison Ross. This later edition was more attractive and more readable than the original (ii did away with the extremely small letters, and with starting the articles in the middle of the page; its layout was uniform, etc). We have, therefore, based our present edition on it.Csoma's more lengthy articles appeared in another periodical of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, in Parts I (1836) and II (1839) of Volume XX of the Asiatic Researches or Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal. The studies dealing with the Lamaist Canon were published again in a somewhat revised edition in 1881 : Analyse du Kand-jour, recueil des livres sacrés du Tibet, par Alexandre Csoma de Kőrös. Traduit de l'anglais et augmenté de diverses additions et remarques par Léon Feer, Musée Guimet, Annales 2, Paris 1881. His study on the life of Shakya appeared in a new edition in 1957: Alexander Csoma Körösi, The Life and Teachings of Buddha, Susil Gupta Private Limited, Calcutta 1957.Brief notices about his articles were published in the monograph that appeared for the centenary of the birth of the author: Theodore Duka, Life and Works of Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, London 1885, and the same also in Hungarian: Duka Tivadar, Körösi Csorna Sándor dolgozatai, Budapest 1885.This is the first time that the articles published in the Asiatic Society's two periodicals appear in one volume, although for the sake of precision it must be mentioned that even the present edition does not contain all of Csoma's articles, since five of these were originally pubhshed as the Appendix to the Grammar, and for the sake of philological fidelity they are now, too, in our present edition.The Editor