Contributions on Tibetan Language, History and Culture: Contributions on Tibetan and Buddhist Religion and Philosophy.

• Author: Tatz, Mark

This reprint of the proceedings of the third meeting of the Csoma de Koros Symposium, held at Velm, Austria, in September of 1981, consists of forty-eight papers by invited participants, including five by Tibetans. The diversity of the subjects addressed gives proof of the "worldwide expanding development of a more and more differentiated Tibetology" - especially, as the editors also point out in their preface, the study of philosophical developments within the monastic traditions of Tibet. (The table of contents' entry indicating that volume two has its own preface is an error.)

These two volumes also establish the status of English as the lingua franca of Tibetology - part of the legacy of Csoma himself. Though it is the native language of only a minority of contributors, thirty-seven of the articles are in English. An additional nine are in German, and two are in French.

Articles devoted specifically to "Tibetan Religion and Philosophy" draw entirely from monastic scholasticism. Other, rich sources of Tibetan religio-philosophic thought and practice are not as well represented. This collection of papers is remarkable in at least one respect: in only three contributions do we see retrogression to the old use of Tibetan as a "crib" for the original (lost) Sanskrit (as T. V. Wylie put it, with reference to the work of E. Conze and L. Hutritz). But that is also part of the legacy of Csoma, who "discovered" the Tibetan canon of translations from Indic languages.

The Buddhological "crib" articles are S. Dietz and C. Lindtner on the identity of Nagarjuna, and O. H. Pind on emptiness in Madhyamaka. Dietz makes the unconvincing argument that the famous letter Suhrllekha was not composed by Nagarjuna, on the grounds that certain doctrines are absent from it. Lindtner also attempts to classify the works of Nagarjuna as authentic or inauthentic on grounds of doctrinal consistency (as though "intellectual development" did not occur in the ancient world). Some familiarity with Tibetan doxography would deepen the understanding, or at least broaden the horizons, of both efforts, as is demonstrated by other articles on the Madhyamaka.

These others consist of M. Kalff on the transcendence of existence and nonexistence in Nagarjuna's Ratnavali, according to the commentary by Rgyal-tshab-rje; K. Mimaki on classifications of Madhyamaka schools in grub-mtha' (Skt. siddhanta) literature; D. Seyfort Ruegg on whether the Madhyamaka propounds a thesis; M. Sato on...