A Propos of a Recent Contribution to Tibetan and Buddhist Studies

THE PUBLICATION OF a complete translation of the Dvags po thar rgyan is an event of considerable interest for Tibetan and Buddhist studies since, with the exception of G. N. Roerich's Blue Annals, this is the first full-scale translation of an important Tibetan text to have been published for many years.1 For apart from a very small handful of notable scholars, Tibetan studies, after having made a promising start in the West in the middle of the last century, have for some time been in a kind of impasse and have come to be more and more neglected; a few other scholars may indeed have taken an interest in things Tibetan from a more or less marginal point of view, but very few are those who could be said to have allowed their work to be guided by principles derived from a study of the Tibetan sources. But surely it is just this that makes into a 'science' what was before an object of curiosity. For a short while in the 1930's a more promising climate again prevailed; for, beside the important translations (or retranslations of works originally translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan) published by such scholars as Th. Stcherbatsky, G. Tucci, E. Lamotte and E. Frauwallner, it was at that time that E. Obermiller's contributions were being published. Obermiller's lead can however scarcely be said to have been followed up, and the author himself has been criticised as lacking in historical

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