Edition, editions: L'Ecrit au Tibet, evolution et devenir.

• Author: King, Matthew
• Position: Book review

Edition, editions: L'Ecrit au Tibet, evolution et devenir. Edited by ANNE CHAYET, CRISTINA SCHERRER-SCHAUB, FRAKOISE ROBIN, and JEAN-Luc ACHARD. Collectanea Himalayica, vol. 3. Munich: INDUS VERLAG, 2010. Pp. xiii + 469. [euro]59.

The third in Indus's excellent Collectanea Himalayica series, Edition, editions, is a collection of twenty papers (in French, English, and Tibetan) originally presented at the conference "Edition, editions: Ltecrit au Tibet, evolution and devenir" at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, in May of 2008.The conference was dedicated to the memory of Dr. Yonten Gyatso (mDo smad pa Yon tan rgya mtsho, 1932-2002), and the volume is prefaced with a memorial and a select bibliography of his published works. The editors introduce the collection with reminiscences of Dr. Yonten Gyatso's rigor in contextualizing interpretation based on a sound text-critical knowledge of sources, filiation, and histories of transmission. This memorial sets the stage for the diverse approaches to conceptualizing the vast topic of writing, editing, and textual circulation in Tibet represented in this rich, if necessarily disjointed, collection. Signaling the importance of this growing body of scholarship, just two years ago Kurtis Schaeffer (one of the contributors to the present volume) published his Culture of the Book in Tibet (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2009). Readers may have hoped for a more comprehensive survey in his work than what was possible to offer in a single contribution; Schaeffer described his own book as "a set of linked case studies highlighting central themes in the study of written culture in Tibet," and he explicitly left work on a more overarching narrative of the place of the book in Tibet to "a future generation" (p. viii). But those impressed by Schaeffer's vivid and erudite exposition should be pleased to see that another substantial publication related to the history of Tibetan book culture has arrived on the market so soon.

Here, the term "edition" refers to collecting facts, compilation, translation, commentary, critique, and arrangement in a written oeuvre (edition), as well as the product of these operations, whether in manuscript, printed, or inscribed form (edition). Its history, as Anne Chayet argues in her introduction, constitutes one of the most promising avenues for approaching economic and social history in Tibet, long neglected because of the difficulty of accessing sources (p. 10). Remi Chaix...