Introduction to THDL Literature Collections

The Tibetan & Himalayan Literature Collections are devoted to cataloging and digitally preserving the vast collections of Tibetan literature, as well as providing intellectual resources for their study. Literary Tibetan has been most widespread in the ethnically Tibetan regions now divided among five provinces of the People's Republic of China, but Tibetan has also been used as a literary language throughout the Himalayan regions of South Asia. The full geographical range in which Tibetan has served as a language of learning, however, is much greater even than this, for, with the promulgation of Tibetan Buddhism among the Mongols and Manchus, literary Tibetan became a common medium of communication among Inner Asian Buddhists by the end of the 17th century, and was used at the beginning of the 20th century as far west as Astrakhan (where the Volga River flows into the Caspian Sea) and as far east as Beijing. Indeed, following the fall of the Soviet Union, ethnic Mongols of the Russian Republic have begun to reaffirm their cultural ties to Tibet and today classical Tibetan is again studied in Astrakhan, where the local government of Kalmykia has recently made it a required subject in the public schools. The study and use of literary Tibetan has also been revived to varying degrees in Buryatia and Tuva in the Russian Federation, among ethnic Mongols and Yi in China, and in Mongolia itself.

The impressive geographical expanse of Tibetan literary history is matched by its temporal depth. In the thirteen centuries since Tibetan has been a written language, literary production has been enormous. At the present time we have access to many thousands of printed volumes and published manuscripts, containing tens of thousands of individual works of many different types: biographies and histories, medical treatises, poetry and epic, grammars and dictionaries, and writings on all aspects of Tibetan religious life and thought. In many cases, Tibetan translations are the only known form in which many important Indian and Chinese works now survive. The study of this legacy is only now emerging from its infancy, and though many particular problems remain unresolved, the general contours of Tibetan literary and cultural history are in important respects becoming clear to those familiar with the range of materials now available in the Tibetan language. A modern literature has also begun to develop in recent years, including fiction and poetry, journalism, and scholarship in fields such as history, linguistics and anthropology. In both China and South Asia, Tibetan works continue to be written and published in large numbers.

The Literature Collection currently contains catalogs of the Collected Tantras of the Ancients, folio scans of one entire edition of the Collected Tantras kindly provided by the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, in-depth documentation of the technical processes involved in gathering and digitizing the bibliographic information, and a catalog of a volume of Bönpo works entitle Oral Traditions of Zhang Zhung. Descriptions and an example of the master catalog for the Collected Tantras, a section on genres of Tibetan literature, and a mock-up for digitally representing a Tibetan text can also be found in this collection.

Current Status: Active projects in the Literature Collection include the Samantabhadra Collection and the Bönpo Textual Collection. The Samantabhadra Collection is a collection of religious literature from the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. It is presently engaged in cataloging several editions of The Collected Tantras of the Ancients, an important and controversial canon of esoteric scriptures. The project provides in-depth cataloging records of each text in this collection, including not only the standard cataloging information but also variant titles, chapter titles, and colophonic information on provenance. Since each edition has a slightly different composition, the project is also compiling a single master catalog, organized by doxographical genres, that lists every title that may be found in any edition of the Collected Tantras. The Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center has kindly provided the project with scanned folio images for several of these editions so that users can actually view the texts themselves. We are also working on entering and marking up certain texts as prototypes for future digitization.

The second project included within the Literature Collection is the Bönpo Textual Collection. This collection deals with the literature of the indigenous religion of Tibet, known as Bön. The Bön tradition has its own canon of religious literature, divided like their Buddhist counterparts into a Kangyur (collection of the founder's original teachings) and Tengyur (collection of commentarial treatises). At present, however, this project is working on cataloging a collection of writings concerning the oral transmitted teachings of that school, a collection known as The Oral Traditions of Zhang Zhung. This group of texts contains biographies of early Bönpo scholars along with descriptions of their teachings.