The Tibetan Collection

India's Contribution -- The PL480 Program

Columbia's Tibetan collection owes its beginnings to two fateful chapters in post-World War II history: the takeover of Tibet by the Chinese communists, and severe famines in India which necessitated the purchase of huge quantities of American grain for Indian government relief efforts.

Lacking the foreign currency to cover its wheat purchase debts, India agreed to repay the United States with multiple copies of all books published in the country for designated university libraries in the United States, beginning in 1961. This became known as the Public Law 480 Program, and was to continue for more than twenty years.

Just two years before PL480 began, the Dalai Lama and many of his followers had fled their homeland and set up an exile government in India, taking with them a sizable portion of their intellectual and spiritual heritage. So in 1968 when a young University of Washington-trained Tibetologist named E. Gene Smith was appointed to the New Delhi office of the Library of Congress to oversee the PL480 Program, he seized this unique opportunity of disseminating Tibetan scholarship. Through his efforts many thousands of Tibetan texts, brought out with the Tibetan refugees, were published and sent to American university libraries as part of India's repayment in kind.

Columbia University was one of the recipient libraries, and during the 1970s and early 1980s, it accumulated a collection of more than 5,000 volumes, the core resource enabling the university to appoint its first professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies, Robert Thurman, in 1989.

Further east, publishing in China in the 1980s began undergoing an incredible rebirth after years of stifled creativity during the ideologically and economically repressive Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Following Deng Xiaoping's liberalizing reforms, thousands of books not only in Chinese but in other minority languages began to appear on the market, including a substantial number in Tibetan.

By the early 1990s, mainland Chinese Tibetan books were no longer just translations of Chinese works or propaganda, but more and more sophisticated works of Tibetan secondary scholarship and reprints of monastic woodblock collections. The time seemed ripe for a new budget for Tibetan materials from Chinese areas, and at the urging of the Chinese Studies Librarian, a new line for Tibetan was approved in 1998.

Increased access to China and its scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s has had a profound effect on Columbia's programs. In addition to the continued development of classical Tibetan religious studies centered in the Religion Department, the East Asian Institute began to broaden its focus by launching an Inner Asia Initiative covering areas like Tibet and Mongolia, in an effort to view East Asia as a whole by examining the historical and contemporary links existing across the region.

The Starr East Asian Library has always collected actively in Chinese, but now also collects quantities of modern Tibetan materials from regions of the People's Republic including the Tibetan Autonomous Region, Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu, Xinjiang, Qinghai, as well as from key minorities research institutes in Beijing and other major centers.

Columbia now has nearly 15,000 titles in the Tibetan language and the publishing boom in Tibetan areas shows no sign of slowing. As Tibetan Studies become more firmly established at leading universities in Europe, the United States, and Asia, thousands more works on Tibetan topics in Chinese, Japanese and Western languages are also being added to our stacks.

However, because of the complicated historical legacy of Tibetan scholarship, and the lack of centralized and coordinated planning for Tibetan book collecting at Columbia until recently, the books of the collection are widely dispersed through the various libraries. Originally, all PL480 materials in Tibetan were deposited in Lehman Library's Tibetan Reading Room and books in other languages were distributed by subject, with humanities going to Butler, social sciences to Lehman, arts to Avery, etc.

At present, the main focus for Tibetan collection development is in the C.V. Starr Library, where the office of the Tibetan Studies Librarian is located. Modern-format books in Tibetan are cataloged and shelved at Starr. Traditional-format texts (dpe-cha) are processed and shelved in the Tibetan Reading Room of the Lehman Library. Nearly half of these have been bound and can circulate. Loose-leaf materials can be read onsite. In addition, a few valuable sets of Tibetan material are stored in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (6th floor, Butler), and in the Special Collections of the Starr Library. [See Tibetan Special Collections]. The location for all materials can be found in the CLIO online records. Please contact the Tibetan Studies Librarian if you face any difficulty finding a text, or would like to place a request for titles not held at Columbia University.

In August 2001, His Holiness the Dalai Lama bestowed a name on our collection, stipulating that henceforth it was to be called the King Songtsen Gampo Tibetan Collection [http://www.tibet.com/Status/3kings.html]. Tenzin Wangden Andrugtsang, in a letter to Fran LaFleur--the Tibetan Studies librarian at the time--explaining His Holiness' choice of name, wrote "[Songsten Gampo] is the Buddhist king under whom Tibetan civilization reached the zenith of its power, Buddhism flourished and under whose direction the letters of the Tibetan alphabet were completed. His reign can be termed as the golden era of the Tibetan civilization ..."

We hope that this auspicious name will usher in a Golden Age for Tibetan Studies at Columbia and the future of our Tibetan collection!

Columbia University owns some very valuable Tibetan religious works, including early Bon texts, as well as a nearly complete Snar-thang edition of the Buddhist Canon.

The Bon texts and the Snar-thang canon are housed in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the sixth floor of Butler Library. These works can be viewed during the Rare Book and Manuscript Library's regular hours, and finding lists and indexes are available at the reference desk. For information about the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, call 854-5153.

The nearly complete Snar-thang edition of the Buddhist Canon was received as a gift to Columbia University in 1955 from Mr. And Mrs. L. Horch. They in turn had acquired this set from Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947) during his expedition into Central Asia between 1925 and 1928.

The Snar-thang edition is considered to be textually the most reliable of all editions, printed between 1730 and 1732, and based on the earliest Tibetan Canon, the so-called "Old Snar-thang" compiled in the 13th century and indexed by the great scholar Bu-ston in the early 14th century.

Columbia's copy, however, is far from ideal as a scholarly tool. While textually accurate, its printing is legible but far from clear, probably having been produced from blocks that were either not carefully cleaned, or which were worn from heavy use. The paper is a traditional Tibetan hand-made variety, which though durable is of a rather crude type of uneven thickness and color.

Textually, the Columbia edition has some peculiarities. It lacks two volumes, the first and last of the Rgyud, or Tantra, section (Vol. 79-ka and vol. 101-sha). Unfortunately, this means that the very important Kalachakra cycle of tantras is missing. However, Columbia's also contains an unusual 103rd volume found in none of the other editions of the Bka'-'gyur.

The folios of this edition average about 7.5 by 30 inches, and are wrapped in red and yellow cloths and placed between two painted pine boards. As the old cloths were in very poor condition and of no intrinsic value, they have recently been replaced by cloths provided by the Exile Government in Dharamsala, through the good offices of Jigme Lhundrup Rinpoche, Auditor General, Office of the Auditors General of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.