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The Tibetan Collection |
History of the King Songtsen Gampo 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. See
[http://tbrc.org/about/mission.php#scholarship] for
more information on the PL480 Program.
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.
China's Role -- Market Forces after Deng
Xiao-ping
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.
Current Conditions
As we enter the 21st century, Columbia has more than 10,000
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. Books in Tibetan from any source since 1998
are cataloged for Starr, regardless of content, unless they are in
loose-leaf format in which case they are designated for the Lehman
Tibetan Reading Room. This means that even traditional format works
which are bound, or produced in facsimile edition but made into
western format, now go to Starr. However, some of the earlier
material, originally loose-leaf but bound in India prior to 1998
still remains in Lehman. There are also some valuable sets of
Tibetan material slated for protective storage in the Rare Book and
Manuscript Library. [See Tibetan Special
Collections].
Western language books on Tibet since 1998 are also designated
for the Starr East Asian Library, but older books are in many
Butler, Lehman, Barnard and other locations. Note the online or
card catalog record to be certain of any title's
location.
Name Conferred by His Holiness The Dalai
Lama
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 te 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!
Tibetan Special Collections
Columbia University owns some very valuable Tibetan religious
works, including early Bon texts
[http://www.bon-religion.at/] as
well as a nearly complete Snar-than' edition of the Buddhist
Canon.
At present, the Bon texts are already housed in the Rare Book
and Manuscript Library on the sixth floor of Butler Library, and
the Snar-than' texts are expected to be moved there shortly.
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 Columbia Snar-than' Canon
The nearly complete Snar-than' 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-than' 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-than'" 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 a strange 103rd volume found
in none of the other editions of the Bkah-`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.
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