A Descriptive Catalogue of the Indigenous Tibetan Manuscripts

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

The Tibetan Manuscripts have reached India in various ways. Csoma-de-Körös, Rai Bahadur Sarat Chandra Das and others went to Tibet and brought a huge number of Tibetan Manuscripts with them. These are deposited in different repositories of India like The Asiatic Society, Calcutta University and some other places. The Tibetan Manuscript is commonly known as Kan-gyur, the canon and Tan-gyur, the commentaries. The present catalogue has a number of miscellaneous texts dealing with different interesting topics. In this collection a large number of texts deal with religion, prayer and lifestories of the eminent Tibetan scholars. This indigenous catalogue focuses on commentaries, rituals, sādhanās etc. It would be a great help for further academic endeavours and also for general readers interested in the field of the study.

Professor Suniti Kumar Pathak, is possibly, the only scholar, who has deciphered into the Buddhist texts and has tried to reconstruct a few texts from their Tibetan version. Professor Pathak is not only an eminent teacher but also an incarnate exponent of veracity, allegiance and enlightenment. His inquisitiveness for knowledge helped him in reaching the pinnacle of success. His imperishable fame is honoured throughout India.

Dr. Archana Ray was born at Kolkata. She did her graduation with honours in Linguistics and post-graduation also in Linguistics with specialization in Tibeto- Burman group. Post-Graduate Diploma on Tibetan Language from Calcutta University. She got BLISC Degree from IGNAU and Certificate in Manuscriptology from The Asiatic Society (1 Year Course). She did her doctorate on Tibetan Manuscript (Critical appreciation) from Jadavpur University She worked as a Cataloguer of Tibetan Manuscripts in the University of Calcutta (1990- 1993). She has been working as Tibetan Cataloguer in The Asiatic Society since 1993.

The resource materials are various manuscripts (bris-ma), xylographs (deb-par) and Thankas (sku-pa) which are preserved in the Asiatic Society, Kolkata. The collection consists of the xylographs printed, using the crudely curved wooden blocks; on the hand-made paper and also some handwritten (bris-ma) manuscripts on rough paper. Eminent scholars like Csoma-de-Körös, Sarat Chandra Das have already utilised some of them in the last two centuries. It may claim that it is one of the treasure houses of the Tibetan collections in India. The endeavours of B. H. Hodgson, G. H. Robinson, Rev. Ruddelb and others deserve special mention in this connection. The Tibetan literary materials belonging to the Asiatic Society Museum may broadly be divided into two divisions:

1) Translated literature

2) Works of the Tibetan indigenous authors.

Several Indian scholars like Vidhusekhar Bhattacharya, Durgacharan Chatterjee, Nalinaksha Dutta, Probodh Chandra Bagchi, Anukul Chandra Banerjee, Prabhas Majumder, Biswanath Banerjee, Aloka Chattopadhyaya follow what Sarat Chandra Das started in the 19th century. They mostly devoted to Tibetan studies of the translated Tibetan literature in the xylographs as classified above. No adequate exposition about those two literary categories has yet been thoroughly furnished other than that was done by Csoma-de-Körös, the hermit-like scholar from Hungary in the 19th century.