Rolf Stein's Tibetica Antiqua, with Additional Materials.

• Author: Quintman, Andrew
• Position: Book review

Rolf Stein's Tibetica Antiqua, with Additional Materials. Translated and edited by ARTHUR P. MCKEON. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Pp. xxix + 384. $185 (cloth).

Rolf Stein, editor Arthur McKeon reminds us, was hailed after his death as "the uncontested master of generations of Tibetologists and Sinologists" (p. xviii). Rolf Stein's Tibetica Antiqua in turn stands as an encyclopedic constellation of his painstaking scholarship on the early history, literature, and religions of Tibet and China. Stein became famous through his work on Tibet's epic tradition surrounding the mythic hero-king Gesar of Ling (Recherches sur l'epopee et le barde au Tibet, Paris: Bibliotheque de l'Institut des Hautes Etudes chinoises, 1959), his translation of selections from the life of the "mad saint" Drukpa Kunle (Vie et chants de 'Brug-pa Kun-legs, le yogin; Bonn: Zentralasiatische Studien, 1972), and his comprehensive study of Tibetan history and culture, La civilisation tibetaine (Paris: Dunod, 1961, revised 1981; published in English as Tibetan Civilization; London: Faber & Faber and Stanford Univ. Press, 1972). The current volume presents English translations of a series of Stein's later work: six articles published sequentially between 1984 and 1992 under the title Tibetica Antiqua I-VI. The articles form a natural series and indeed Stein himself intended them to be viewed as a set.

Producing this collection entailed a tremendous amount of work, far beyond the usual editorial process of selection, collation, and reproduction. As McKeon notes, the volume's publication required translating not only Stein's French, but also his Tibetan and Chinese materials. (McKeon acknowledges that the third and fifth essay were previously translated by Peter Richards and published in Alex McKay's three-volume History of Tibet [New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003].) The result is a careful reinterpretation of Stein's original insights. McKeon rendered Stein's French transliteration of Tibetan terms into the now standard Wylie system. He likewise transposed Chinese terms into Pinyin, with characters moved inline from Stein's original handwritten appendices.

Following the editor's prefatory remarks and biographical sketch of Stein's training and intellectual work, Cristina Scherrer-Schaub provides a brief introduction to the collection, describing Stein's work published in Tibetica Antiqua as forming "a fundamental corpus of writings for the history of Tibet" (p. xxiii). Although Stein did...