Všeobecné zrcadlo digitální Asie

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.

The ERC funded research project BuddhistRoad creates a new framework to enable understanding of the complexities in the dynamics of cultural encounter and religious transfer in pre-modern Eastern Central Asia—the vast area extending from the Taklamakan desert to Northeast China. This region was the crossroads of ancient civilisations. Its uniqueness was determined by complex dynamics of religious and cultural exchanges gravitating around an ancient communication artery, known as the Silk Road. Buddhism was one major factor in this exchange; its transfer predetermined the transfer of adjacent aspects of culture.

DREAMSEA is a program to preserve Southeast Asian manuscripts and their contents and aims to disclose the immense cultural treasures to the world. Supported by the Arcadia Foundation in the United Kingdom, the program is run by the Center for the Study of Islam and Society (PPIM) of the Syarif Hidayatulah State Islamic University in Jakarta and the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) of the University of Hamburg. DREAMSEA preserves endangered manuscripts owned and kept by individuals who live in Southeast Asia. Manuscripts collected by institutions fall beyond the scope of the program. It is important to highlight that many manuscripts are in unfavorable conditions and their future existence is threatened. Because many manuscripts are or will be damaged, their contents may disappear forever.

The Society of Friends of the Kern Institute (Vereniging Vrienden van het Instituut Kern or VVIK) supports and promotes the study of South Asia, in particular India and Tibet. The society organises lectures and excursions, provides subsidies for study trips, supports the expansion and public use of the VVIK library collections, and brings out a Newsletter and other publications. She also supports, via de ‘Dr. de Cock-fundatie’, the website ‘Dutch Studies on South Asia, Tibet and classical Southeast Asia’. The VVIK acts in close cooperation with the South Asian and Tibetan Studies program of the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS). The VVIK was founded in 1924 with prof. J.Ph. Vogel as its chairman. One of the main goals was to establish a research institute for the archaeology and art history of South and Southeast Asia at Leiden University. This institute was named after Hendrik Kern ‒ the first Leiden professor of Sanskrit ‒ and opened its doors on 4 April 1925. In the course of the 20th century the Kern Institute developed into an establishment for the study of India and Tibet in the broadest sense. It acted in close cooperation with Leiden University. In 1960 this cooperation resulted in an agreement with the University according to which the VVIK delegated the preservation of its collections to the university. Although in the 1980s all separate university institutes were abolished, the name ‘Kern Institute’ has remained. At present, the Kern Institute is the Dutch national centre of expertise on South Asia and the Himalayas, including India, Pakistan, Tibet, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The VVIK is separate from the South and Southeast Asian Studies program of Leiden University. At present the VVIK has about 100 members, inside and outside academia. The members of the VVIK are deeply involved in the study of India and Tibet.

Scholar, explorer, writer and pilgrim John Vincent Bellezza is widely recognized as one of the foremost specialists in the archaeology and ancient cultural history of Tibet. He has lived in the high Himalaya for over a quarter of a century. Explore these pages for information about his work.

Notes, thoughts and fragments of research on the history of Tibet. Written by Sam van Schaik.

Personal blog of Dorji Wangchuk alias Kuliśeśvara (Germany). It is for pure speculations and reflections. Nonetheless, it contains numerous valuable remarks regarding Tibetan literature.

The Xinjiang Data Project (XDP) brings together rigorous, empirical research on the human rights situation for Uyghurs and other non-Han nationalities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in western China. It focuses on a core set of topics including mass internment camps, surveillance and emerging technologies, forced labour and supply chains, the ‘re-education’ campaign, deliberate cultural destruction and other human rights issues. Drawing on open source data including satellite imagery, Chinese government documents, official statistics and a range of authoritative reports and academic studies, the Xinjiang Data Project documents the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing program of human rights abuses and tech-enhanced authoritarianism in Xinjiang, and explores its global implications. Valuable source of information for journalists, investigators, and academics.

The theme of this blog is the history of the Tibetan army under the Ganden Phodrang government (1642-1959)

International Dunhuang Project (IDP) is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.

Old Tibetan Documents Online (OTDO) is a corpus of selected Old Tibetan texts (VIIth to XIIth centuries): Dunhuang manuscripts, Inscriptions and related materials. We provide critically edited texts together with search and KeyWord In Context (KWIC) facilities.

The Tibet Map Institute's objective is the mapping of the Tibetan area using (i) toponyms given by travellers,cartographers,etc (ii) Landsat satellite photos The aim is to give a picture of Tibet before the establishment of the Chinese Administration(1950). Those maps are also interesting for private travellers due to the precision of geographic details and the number of villages. Presently 156 maps (including more then 15000 place-names)are available from Ngari to Kham (between 28 to 36 degree north and 79 to 100 degree east). Each A3+ map covers 1 by 1 degree of long/lat. with a scale of 1:310 000 (33x45cm). Each A3 map covers 1 by 1 degree of long/lat. with a scale of 1:360 000 (30x42cm). Maps are available with different toponym characters: currents names, Wylie transliteration or Tibetan. Current names are in the Classical Tibet maps. End 2008 an Atlas of the Tibet Autonomous Region is available. A glossary give the tibetan toponyms available in Wylie.

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.

The resources have been collected with your help, and we invite everyone to help us further expand this list by sending suggested links to: resources@iias.nl

I am a historian of premodern Japan and currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies at UCLA. My research focuses on metal caster organizations from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries and their relationships with elite institutions. I also work on documentary forgery production and socioeconomic networks during Japan’s late medieval period. I am interested in digital humanities and the use of digital tools to analyze premodern historical sources. I manage and collaborate in several online projects, including the Digital Humanities Japan initiative; an online database for resources related to East Asia; the blog What can I do with a B.A. in Japanese Studies?; and the digital archive Carving Community: The Landis-Hiroi Collection.

An academic website and blog written monthly by Dan Martin, covering mostly premodern subjects since 2006.

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.

RelBib is an online open access bibliography for the study of religion. It represents a special view of the underlying data pool of IxTheo (Index Theologicus) using a discovery system VuFind.

We would like to share this collection of splendid murals with as many fellow enthusiasts, students, scholars, and travellers, as possible. The aim of this documentation is not only to provide a tool for further research on South Indian painting, but mainly to make the art world aware of this endangered cultural heritage and to encourage not only scholarship, but also restoration and conservation works.

The Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL) is a publisher of websites, information services, and networking facilities relating to the Tibetan plateau and southern Himalayan regions. THL promotes the integration of knowledge and community across the divides of academic disciplines, the historical and the contemporary, the religious and the secular, the global and the local. In addition to more typical academic projects, THL promotes participatory knowledge that is created by and benefits local communities, while including contributors from all walks of life around the world. Data includes text, audio-video, images, maps, immersive objects, reference works, and interpretative essays. THL’s knowledge and technology are provided free of charge, and are built collaboratively by hundreds of people across the world who share this vision. We also have sister initiatives built by and for the communities in this region – the Tibetan Digital Library and the Bhutan National Digital Library. Explore our websites and services, and consider joining us as active participants.

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

The SRC is a web application for Tibetan historical and literary research. It is designed as an open online platform and reference system and is based on a corpus of machine-readable digital texts in Tibetan that are embedded in an interlinked, relational database. The resource has grown into a large repository of Tibetan digital texts, historical references, images and geo-data. Data is entered and processed by a group of Tibetan-language scholars and Western Tibetologists. The database holds a considerable amount of additional literature, including standard works of Tibetan historiographical literature, as well as numerous genealogies, hagiographies, teaching records and religious histories related especially to the Sakya sect of Tibetan Buddhism. Digital texts are encoded in XML following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI); they are fully searchable and linked to other entities in the database.

The repository "bodleian/karchak-mss" contains underlying XML files for the catalogue of Tibetan Manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. - "collections" contains the TEI P5 manuscript description files - "processing" contains any scripts to convert or process them - "working" contains the working files before and after conversion

A catalogue of Tibetan Manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries (Oxford). Includes indexes of authors and subjects.

Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IOM RAS). Its collection of manuscripts and xylographs consists of more than 100 thousand items in 65 living and dead languages such as Abyssinian (Ethiopian), Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, Kurdish, Manchurian, Mongolian, Persian and Tajik, Sanskrit and Sogdian, Turkic, Tangut, Tibetan, Uigur, Japanese, etc. The IOM has also the Archives of the Orientalists that contains some extremely valuable documents on the history of the Oriental Studies in Russia. The Institute possesses a specialized library of books, exceeding 800 thousand volumes, on various branches of Oriental studies. The collection of books in languages of the peoples of the former USSR especially those issued in the 30s is also of a great value. The Institute runs doctoral programs. Its Dissertation Council has the right to consider PhD and Habilitation theses written in the area of history and source criticism.

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.

CrossAsia offers access to specialized information from the entire spectrum of humanities and social sciences from and about Asia. CrossAsia supports the Asia-related studies in research and teaching in Germany and beyond. It has developed outstanding, partly unique services for Asia-related research. Examples include the steadily growing set of licensed full-text databases with nationwide remote access; the CrossAsia Search, which, in addition to its own printed and electronic holdings, provides central access to Asia-related original-language bibliographic records in catalogues of national and international libraries; a full-text search which searches in the data pool of the Integrated Text Repository (ITR) with full-texts extracted from licensed databases; and Open Access E-Publishing services for eJournals, eBooks, and electronic primary and secondary publications. The CrossAsia portal was designed as a central access point for scientific information in the Asia-related studies. The portal has been set up by Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Together with Heidelberg University Library and the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin runs the Specialised Information Service on Asia (Fachinformationsdienst Asien), which provides significant impetus for the development of the CrossAsia portal. On the CrossAsia website, Thematic Portals include Manchu Collection; "Bibliothek Otsuka“ – the Ōtsuka collection; Berlin-Krakow Project; Fung Asseng and Fung Ahok; Chagatai manuscripts (The Hartmann Collection); Chinese Medical Manuscripts; Travels in Southwest China; Japanese Students in Germany; Naval Kishore Press; and Odisha Bibliography. Digital collections include: the East Asia Collection; the Southeast Asia Collection; Berlin-Krakow Project; Qianlong’s “Battle Copper Prints;” Historical Mongolian Maps; Lao Manuscripts; Northern Thai Manuscripts; Literature on South Asia; Slide collection Sontheimer; Early Bengali Literature; and Documenta Nepalica.

The Center for Research on Tibet at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) was founded in 1987. Our goal is to conceptualize and conduct research on Tibetan history, society, language, ecology/physiology and culture so as to understand traditional Tibet and the manner in which it has changed. The Center is housed in Mather Memorial Building at Case Western Reserve University, and is administratively under the Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences. Drs. Melvyn C. Goldstein (the John Reynolds Harkness Professor of Anthropology) and Cynthia M. Beall (the Sarah Idell Pyle Professor of Anthropology) are its co-Directors. From the beginning, the Center has maintained a collaborative relationship with the Tibet Academy of Social Sciences (TASS) in Lhasa, and has undertaken a wide range of research projects on different aspects of present and past Tibet with the cooperation of TASS. Since 1988, the Center has hosted eight scholars from TASS for periods ranging from 6 months to one year. Two young Tibetan researchers from TASS have received Masters of Arts degrees in Anthropology (1988 and 2003), while another Tibetan student earned a Doctorate of Philosophy in 2001. At present, the Center has expanded its "research" goal by adding a commitment to preserve and organize its unique corpus of primary data in a way that will make it readily available to students, scholars and Tibetans globally. With support from The Henry Luce Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, we are in the process of creating a major online archive that will include, initially, 700-1,000 hours of taped interviews and their English translations. These will all be indexed and searchable through keywords. Almost all of the interviewees are Tibetans, a small but important sub-set are Chinese military and civil officials who worked in Tibet. This unique corpus of interviews covers three major areas: modern Tibetan history, the traditional social and economic life in Drepung (Tibet's largest monastery in the traditional period), and the oral history of the lives of common rural and urban Tibetans. The period for the oral history interviews spans from the pre-Chinese period to the end of the Cultural Revolution. Donations to help support the Tibet Oral History Archive are most welcome, and should be sent to Case Western Reserve University, College of Arts and Sciences, The Center for Research on Tibet (Oral History Archive), Cleveland, Ohio 44106. All donations are tax deductible. For more details on the Oral History Project see that section of this website.

The Dharma Farm carries on the training we received at Jeffrey Hopkins' famed Tibetan program at the University of Virginia in Tibetan and Sanskrit translating Tibetan works about the Buddhist philosophy of liberation. We believe accurate translation rests on understanding the underlying grammar and syntax. The Dharma Farm is a free on-line Tibetan language translation school founded in 2020 in Oregon as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization. Our focus is preparing translators with the linguistic skills and philosophical background necessary for translating Tibetan works on Buddhist philosophy. Dharma Farm students are a global community, both monastics and lay people, who wish to develop the skills necessary for translating Tibetan Buddhist philosophical works.

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.