Dr Martin A. Mills, Anthropologist and Director of the Scottish Centre for Himalayan Research, University of Aberdeen. Tibet, Himalayas, anthropology.

Roberto Vitali is an independent researcher, author of books and articles, editor of volumes and journals, convener of seminars.

Project Himalayan Art is a three-part initiative that offers comprehensive resources for teaching about Tibetan, Himalayan, and Inner Asian art and cultures, with a focus on cross-cultural exchange. This dynamic project serves as a content hub for teaching on Asia across a wide range of disciplines, including history, religion, art, and anthropology.The project’s goal is to encourage integration of Tibetan and Himalayan art and cultures into liberal arts curricula, expanding their inclusion in Asian Studies courses. We seek to remedy their underrepresentation and the lack of introductory resources for teaching about the region.

The Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project was launched in April 2002. Its main purpose is to prepare a comprehensive descriptive catalogue of the more than 180,000 Nepalese manuscripts microfilmed under the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project.

Khyentse Foundation is pleased to announce the official launch of the Kumarajiva Project (note: website is currently only in Chinese). KF’s latest translation effort focuses primarily on translating into Chinese all the texts in the Tibetan Buddhist canon that are not currently available in the Chinese canon. After a successful pilot project and several years of extensive research and planning, the Kumarajiva Project is now prepared to dive into the immense task of translating more than 130,000 pages of Tibetan texts into Chinese.  Watch Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche introduce the project. The Kumarajiva Project is known in Chinese as 圓滿法藏-佛典漢譯計畫, the transliteration of which is “Yu’an Man Fa-Zang.” The Chinese name translates roughly to “enriching the treasury of the dharma” or “making the treasury more perfect than it already is.” The “treasury” refers to the Chinese Buddhist canons. Also, there are numerous texts from other Buddhist canons that are not available in Chinese. The vision of the Kumarajiva Project is to make all Buddhist texts available in Chinese, starting by translating the texts that are available in Tibetan but not in Chinese.

The Tibetan Oral History and Archive Project (TOHAP) is a digital online web archive of oral history interviews in Tibetan and Chinese with accompanying written transcripts (in English) that documents the social and political history of modern Tibet. The interview tapes can be listened to simultaneous with reading the transcripts. The translations were made in a literal style to retain a flavor of the original Tibetan. The TOHAP collection includes a large corpus of interviews from common folks and Drepung monastery monks speaking about their lives, and Tibetan and Chinese officials speaking about modern Tibetan history. An interactive glossary is available to explain Tibetan terms that appear in the transcripts. As of April 2019, the portion of the TOHAP Collection that is available on line consists of 403 tapes (361 from the Political/History collection, 35 from the common folk collection and 7 from the Drepung collection). These come from interviews with 125 interviewees. This comprises on line approximately 500 hours of recordings and about 11,000 pages of transcripts. Future installments will add the small remainder of the Political collection and more tapes and transcripts from the Common Folk and Drepung Collections over the next few years. These interviews were collected by Professor Melvyn C. Goldstein and his assistants/colleagues during a series of research projects on modern Tibet history and society that were funded by the National Geographic Society (1980-81), National Endowment for the Humanities (RO-20261-82, RO-20886-85, RO-21860-89, RO-22251-91, RO-22754-94) and during a large Tibetan Oral History Project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (RZ-20585-00, RZ-50326-05, RZ-50845-08). Professor Goldstein is the John Reynolds Harkness Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Center for Research on Tibet at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Knowledge of the social and political history of Tibet during the second half of the Twentieth Century has been limited by the absence of the voices of everyday Tibetans and officials from the traditional Tibetan government. The Tibetan Oral History and Archive Project was undertaken by Professor Goldstein to collect and preserve these voices and with it a record of the diversity of life as it was lived in Tibet in the traditional and socialist eras. The ensuing Oral History Archive consists of interviews with almost 700 Tibetans (and a few Chinese) living in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China and in exile in India and the West about their lives and modern history. This archive, the largest of its type in the world, contains three collections: the Common Folk Oral History collection, the Political or Historical Collection and the Drepung Monastery Collection.  The Common Folk Collection consists of recorded interviews in Tibet and India with over 600 Tibetans from all strata about their lives during the traditional society and the socialist period through the Cultural Revolution. Its files begin with the code: OR… The Political Collection consists of recorded interviews with former Tibetan government officials who played important roles in Tibet's history. The topics discussed include historical events in both the traditional and socialist periods. Its files begin with the code: H… The Drepung Monastery Collection consists of recorded interviews on monastic social and economic life with roughly 100 monks who were members of Drepung monastery in the traditional era. Drepung monastery is located 5 miles outside of Lhasa and was Tibet's largest monastery, housing about 10,000 monks in 1959 at the end of the traditional era. Its files begin with the code:  M…

The HAV is a modern multimedia archive at the Center for Inter­disciplinary Research and Documentation of Inner and South Asian Cultural History (CIRDIS), University of Vienna, and home to research documentation from South and Inner Asia with a special focus on the Himalaya. Its over-arching archive structure houses multi-disciplinary data originating from largely third-party funded research projects as well as private collections or donations. It aims to provide a strong foundation for the successful collaboration between research partners from various disciplines united by a common interest and wish to preserve and share their data according to the policies of the open science community. The HAV is under active development. This first release is a glimpse into the thematic and geographical width and depth of the material currently being archived and a series of advanced representational features planned to be integrated later on. At the time of writing a number of further collections are already being evaluated and/or prepared for ingestion. Further information about us, our ongoing research initiatives and related news can be found on the website of CIRDIS.

Studies in Nepali History and Society (SINHAS) is a peer-reviewed semi-annual publication of Martin Chautari (Kathmandu DAO Registration No. 289/059/060). SINHAS was founded in 1996 and is published by Mandala Book Point, Kathmandu, Nepal, in June and December. SINHAS provides an interdisciplinary forum for original research. The journal aims to further understanding of cultural politics and social conditions in Nepal through a commitment to historical analysis, attention to Nepali scholarship, and a willingness to explore new terrains. Detailed studies from any discipline are invited. All papers must have a substantive focus on Nepal, but comparative work is also welcome. In addition to research-based articles, the journal invites submissions in the following areas: Critical reflection on the state of Nepal Studies. Articles may be oriented by topic, period, region or discipline; Commentary: Opinion pieces on current social issues, usually by individuals with first-hand experience of the topic under discussion; Single- and two-book reviews and multi-volume book review essays; and Notes from the archive: Original extracts from public and private archives with additional notes.

Welcome to Opuscula Buddhologica et Tibetologica on the WordPress! Some of you who know me may think: “Oh no, not again!” This would be a justified reaction because I have several blogs (https://www.blogger.com), which are hardly consistently and continually maintained. Some entries there may be of some academic value but they were never meant to be academically valuable. They were meant to be mere hobbies and sandboxes. I play there whenever I can. But of course the nicest thing would be if work itself can be enjoyed as a hobby. As an academic, one might say that the best holiday would be when one can study and write petty academic works undisturbed by the hustle and bustle of bureaucratic works and other non-academic obligations. What one often ends up doing is stealing, whenever one can, a few moments between various commitments and obligations, and grabbing an academic book and taking down a few random notes (zin bris, brjed tho or brjed byang). But soon one would realize that these notes are like “drawings on the surface of water” (chu’i ri mo). Even if one had etched one’s notes on paper, which one believes is more tangible and durable, it is not easy to trace them again, for one is often on one’s way without any paper. Of course, I know that some people are so systematic and consistent that they can easily trace anything from anywhere. I respect and envy them! So blogs are solutions for people like myself. (a) One can easily write anything on blogs and easily access one’s writings. (b) One can easily delete, add, or change them whenever one wants. (c) It is surprisingly durable and tangible. (d) One can instantaneously share ideas with the interested readership. While none of my previous blogs were meant to be “academic,” this particular blog, lays some claim to being “academic.” I hasten to concede that all my academic writings are hypothetical and are prone to deletions or corrections. While I take full responsibility for the petty little things that I write here, I cannot be sure of their reliability. As my German professor is wont to advise, we cannot fully trust anybody’s work particularly not one’s own. These blog articles will be mostly very terse for they will often be written based on a few random notes and completed in just in one sitting. They would be imperfect. But they would provide me with a feeling of an instant success and fulfillment. If an article grows beyond its scope, I may close down it down and publish it elsewhere in a printed form. Last but not least, I sincerely apologize in advance to all those whose mother tongue is English and to those who write in perfect and elegant English. English is not my mother tongue, and even if it were, I am not so sure if I would have acquired the necessary talent to write in English with mastery, clarity, and beauty. I can only call on readership’s leniency with all the imperfections that bound these short blog articles.

Vaše vstupenka do Asie, Váš průvodce Orientem....

Orientalistický Expres, z. s. je sdružením českých současných i bývalých studentů a dalších členů akademické obce, jejichž badatelský zájem se soustředí či soustředil na některý z regionů Orientu v nejširším možném významu tohoto slova.

BuddhaNexus is a text-matching database with visualization capabilities that draws its data from Buddhist literary corpora in Pāli, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese. It allows users to conduct intralingual searches (e.g. searching among texts in Chinese only) of individual volumes for textual matches across the collection in question. Additionally, users are also able to produce Sankey visualizations of connections within different collections in the same language, which offers an intertextual view across collections, sections within collections, and within single texts.

PlateauCulture presents an archive of images, writings, and place information about areas on and surrounding the Tibetan Plateau. Contributors are mainly students, members/managers of local media projects, and local and foreign teachers and scholars. The images here are mainly from Plateau Photographers, a participatory photography project that supports young photographers, bu other local and outside photographers' work is here too. We are also the online publisher for the Asian Highlands Perspectives journal. Most but not all of the writings are published journal articles. Place Citations are discreet snippets about a place. Sometimes, these are analyses of sources, but often just quotes.

G. M. Trevelyan, one of the pioneers of Social History, described the emerging field as “history with the politics left out”. A more charitable characterisation of the discipline has been proposed by Mary Fulbrook, who defended it as “history with the people put back in”. The aim of SHTS, a Franco-German research project jointly funded by the ANR (French National Research Agency) and the DFG (German Research Council) is to carry out fundamental research on the social history of Tibetan societies, from the mid-17th to the mid-20th centuries – a period corresponding to the duration of the so-called Ganden Phodrang government in Tibet. The region under consideration is “ethnographic Tibet” (i.e. ethnically Tibetan areas in the PRC and adjacent countries, especially Nepal and India). The main source materials will be the large archival collections already photographed by members of both the French and German research teams in Tibet, Nepal and India. Those documents that have not already been digitised (in the case of collections photographed with 35mm film) will be scanned, catalogued, transliterated and paraphrased or translated, and the entirety of the material made available as a resource for the international scholarly community in printed volumes and/or on searchable websites. The team will use these materials, in combination with published Tibetan sources, British Foreign Office archives, Nepali and Chinese documents and fieldwork-based investigations, to address issues that have never been satisfactorily treated by scholars: the nature of legal, fiscal and administrative relations among the various centres and peripheries in the region; the adequacy of characterising Tibet as a feudal society; the social role of clerics and nobles, farmers, nomads, craftsmen and traders; the organisation of civil society; strategies of dispute resolution and the numerous legal systems that prevailed in different areas. In addition to creating the largest available resource for the further study of Tibetan social history, members of the project will also produce monographs and articles focusing on selected geographical areas, on particular social groups, and on broader thematic issues.

Until relatively recent times the Bon religion of Tibet was poorly understood by the majority of Tibetans and Westerners alike. Although our general knowledge has advanced greatly in the past few decades thanks to the work of a few pioneering scholars, misconceptions still abound, and many areas of this fascinating religion remain obscure. While most of the secondary literature on Bon has dealt with the history, philosophy and meditative systems of the religion, the domain of ritual is still substantially unexplored. Some of the most important contributions to this subject that have so far been published are presented here. [link] Understandably, students of Bon ritual have tended to favour the literary component: after all, where the rituals in question are obsolete, this is the only option available to the researcher, except in the rather unusual cases where the surviving texts are supplemented with illustrations. But ritual, by definition, includes an important performative element. In addition to the various accoutrements and effigies that feature in any performance, there are gestures, processions and interactions that are generally described in only the vaguest terms in the liturgical sources, where they are mentioned at all. Some of the most interesting aspects of ritual performances have no place whatsoever in the sources. These would include a lama’s idiosyncratic interpretation of text prescriptions, his exchanges with the other participants (such as his assistant and his patrons), the occurrence of errors (an assistant pouring red dye onto an effigy what should remain uncoloured), and solicited or spontaneous commentaries on procedures. If the text is just one – albeit an essential – component of a ritual, observing an actual performance can be a hopelessly confusing experience. Behind the noise, the chaotic activity and the protracted chanting it is often far from clear what is going on. One of the main purposes of this site is to render Bonpo rituals more accessible by combining the textual and performative dimensions. A detailed explanation of how this works is given [here], but the general idea can be explained in simple terms as follows: The site hosts several dozen Bonpo ritual texts. The texts are presented in facsimile form as well as romanised transliteration, and, in many cases, with a full English translation and notes. The performative aspect is represented by video recordings of a number of rituals, to which access can be had via links on the site’s pages. The videos are subtitled in English, and range in duration from approximately ten minutes to eight hours. Each ritual is also covered by an article that is divided into two main parts: 1. a general discussion of that category of rituals; and 2. a detailed description of a particular performance. The articles are illustrated with photographs, diagrams and tables, and contain numerous links. The links are of two kinds: 1. to texts; and 2. to video footage. The links will take you to precisely that point in the text or the video that is relevant to the part of the performance that is being described. (It is also possible, of course, to see the texts or watch the videos in their entirety.) The transcriptions of the texts also contain links that will take you to the point in the video where any given passage is being recited. This will enable you to see exactly what is going on when the lama is reading that section of the text. We hope, in time, to establish reciprocal links. This means that it will be possible to go from a point in a video to the corresponding point in a text (assuming that a text is being used at that moment) or to the description furnished in the accompanying article. While this website is dedicated mainly to ritual it also offers resources that are relevant to other areas of the Bon religion. These resources include: paintings (tsaklis and thangkas); texts not directly connected to ritual (such as biographies and canonical works); Tibetan periodicals and other publications related to Bon; scholarly contributions to Bon studies in Tibetan and in European languages.

Founded by Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche as an institution of higher learning for those wishing to deepen their understanding of Buddhist philosophy and practice, Rangjung Yeshe Institute (RYI) has been conducting seminars and study programs in Nepal for more than 25 years. Since 2001, the Institute has worked in close partnership with Kathmandu University to manage the Kathmandu University Centre for Buddhist Studies at Rangjung Yeshe Institute which offers undergraduate and post-graduate degree courses in Buddhist Studies and related topics. RYI may, to a large extent, be regarded as the Buddhist equivalent of a divinity school or seminary where spiritual practice is an integral part of the daily experience and where program graduates are scholar-practitioners. RYI envisions a world in which a wide diversity of people, interested in learning about Buddhism, has easy access to a living Buddhist tradition in order to foster the qualities of wisdom and compassion for the benefit of all sentient beings. Rangjung Yeshe Institute's mission is to be a centre of higher learning, working to the highest standards, to provide both traditional and modern Buddhist education through teaching, translation, publication, research and practice. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche and the RYI community were delighted to welcome Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. After a short tour of RYI, Rinpoche generously shared his insight on the place of academic studies in the transmission of Dharma teachings. Following his talk, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche also gave brief advice on Buddhist study and practice. Here is a full capture of the event.

Himalayan Art Resources features thousands of artworks from Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, India, China and Mongolia. The site presents art from leading private and museum collections, accompanied by scholarship, cataloging and interpretation. The mission of the Himalayan Art Resources website (HAR) is to create a comprehensive education and research database and virtual museum of Himalayan art: First, the website exhibits images of art from museum, university and private collections throughout the world. Second, the website documents all Himalayan art objects that are known through past or present collections or publications. Third, the database identifies and catalogues all images (comprised of painting, sculpture, ritual objects, murals, etc.). When an object image is not available for lack of permission from the copyright holder, the database uses a place card image. Book cover images are used for publications and generic place cards for collections. Fourth, the Himalayan Art Resources Inc. website owns no actual or material art. All images on the Himalayan Art Resources Inc. website belong to the individual institutions, museums, private collections and individuals that have loaned their images to the site.

Tools in the traditional library include interactive catalogs on computer work stations, microfilm readers, photocopiers and so forth to allow users to search and access its collections, as well as in limited ways also compile their own collections of information. Similarly, the digital library provides integrated software systems, tools, and fonts in general to enable users to work with the collections with search and access procedures considerably more powerful than the traditional library. In particular, though, the digital library goes far beyond the limited traditional tools of a library in its enabling of users to creatively interact with the digital collections and reference materials, as well as generate new user-defined collections for their own private purposes. The simplest level of functionality includes extraction of images and composing sequenced slide-shows on line, while more advanced features are, for example, the ability to make HTML pages drawing upon library resources, compile private dictionaries, create new videos from segments of existing videos and so forth. This site also provides a suite of Tibetan fonts along with software developed by THDL that enhances the use of these fonts both in word processors and on the Web. Together these tools aim to help other projects and individuals take advantage of technical work done by the Library, as well as provide a way to facilitate communication, exchange, interoperability, and project building among all scholars, students, and others interested in Tibet and the Himalayan regions. In particular, the Library is committed to developing digital tools to assist the teaching of Tibetan and Himalayan languages, literatures, environments, and cultures. The evolving multilingual capacity of the digital library system also offers the promise of a single integrated library that serves different communities with distinct language bases, as well as promote communication between them. There are six (6) overarching types of tools, all of which have been developed with an eye toward balancing the power of the latest technology against the need to reach the broadest possible audience. Technical Requirements for Using THDL From the Field to the Web Technologies used in THDL Software designed by THDL Fonts and input tools

Promoting the exchange of knowledge and ideas, Tibetan language use and literacy, and sharing of resources.

Online version of R.L. Turner's 'A comparative and etymological dictionary of the Nepali language: With indexes of all words quoted from other Indo-Aryan languages' from the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia.

Collections of a Tibetophone music (and recorded poetry) assembled by Mireille Helffer and her colleagues, recorded since 1969 across Tibet, Ladakh, India, and Nepal. Religious, popular, and folk music plus photos are all divided into five corpuses. CNRSMH_Helffer - CREM-CNRS fonds are maintained by Research Centre of Ethnomusicology (CREM), University of Paris 10 (CNRS) and the Musee de l'Homme.

Digital repository hosted by the University of Virginia dedicated to all Tibetan materials covering broader Tibetan cultural sphere. Includes knowledge maps, e-texts, audiovisual materials (photographs, recordings, videos), place names, glossary of terminology, dictionary, and subjects. All searchable.

The Interuniversity Research Group on Tibet and the Himalayas (Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire sur le Tibet et l’Himalaya, GRITH), funded by the FRQ-SC, brings together all of the academics in Québec province carrying out research about the greater Himalayan region. The aim of this group is to assemble their multidisciplinary knowledge and capacities, strengthen the synergy between all researchers, regardless of their level of advancement in career, and stimulate collaborations between all members - and beyond, with national and international partners. At present, the group comprises six professors based in five Québec universities, their twenty-or-so graduate students and several associate members, who all fluently speak or or more Asian languages. All are deeply involved, both intellectually and personally, in their fieldwork locations in High Asia and among the diasporic communities of their elective region in Canada and Europe. The team’s strengths rely on the multidisciplinary convergence of the experience and competence of the members across diverse regions of the Himalayas. Bringing in dialogue religious studies, anthropology, philology and history, the members wish to rethink the concept of power in this region along two main focuses : the instrumentalization of history and the analysis of ritual as power technology. The aim is to better document the political, religious and cultural upheavals of these diverse communities, combining historical depth with geographic breadth. Hopefully, this will allow for a more dynamic contribution of Québec-based Tibetologists and Himalayanists to global academic and public debates about the predicament of High Asia.

A website dedicated to the study of 5th to 18th century Buddhist Art of the Himalayas (mostly sculpture).

Object Lessons from Tibet & the Himalayas is a research community that brings together academics, museums, and Tibetan scholars, groups and cultural organisations to think about the roles of objects and images in knowledge production, loss and recovery. We want to ask new questions of Tibetan and Himalayan objects. Therefore, rather than focusing on the object’s religious significance we want to think about the ways objects enable us to understand historical, political and contemporary events and encounters.

This free online encycolpedia and media library of Tibetan Buddhism was created in December 2006 by students of the Rigpa Shedra in Pharping, Nepal. In contains thousands of articles on various subjects concerning Buddhist, mostly Tibetan Buddhist topics.

Digital Himalaya is a project to develop digital collection, storage, and distribution strategies for multimedia anthropological and ethnographical information from the Himalayan region. Digital collections feature different media, including visual and audio collections, covering the geographical areas and ethnic populations of the Himalayas; issues of Himalayan journals; maps; and bird reports from Nepal.

Searchable collection of Indo-Tibetan texts, authors, places, and maps from the catalogue of Cambridge University.

Resources for Kanjur & Tanjur Studies (rKTs) is dedicated to making research on Tibetan Buddhist canonical collections openly accessible. The website provides comprehensive tools for studying canonical literature in more than 50 Kanjurs and manuscript collections, such as online catalogues, searchable e-texts, and an extensive archive of images of Tibetan manuscripts as well as secondary sources. The various databases are compiled and maintained by the members of the Tibetan Manuscripts Project Vienna (TMPV), located at the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, University of Vienna. For enquiries about individual collections or questions of a more general nature, please use the contact page.

The Treasury of Lives (TOL) is a biographical encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia, and the Himalaya. Most biographies are peer reviewed. Maps, images, and other resources are available too, covering vast amount of Buddhist traditions and even biographies of lay people (soldiers, writers or politicians). Most of the content is open access, yet a subscription is available as well.