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The result of the authors’ painstaking documentation of over 1,500 Tibetan copies of the Sutra of Limitless Life from Dunhuang, now kept in the British Library’s Stein Collection, this book provides a detailed study of the sutra copies, how they were produced for the Tibetan emperor in ninth-century Dunhuang, and how they were conserved in twentieth-century England. It explores the lives of Dunhuang’s multi-ethnic scribes, editors, and administrators and reveals how their practices changed in a short period of time during the 820s. In addition, the book surveys the significant differences across the multiple Tibetan and Chinese versions of the Sutra of Limitless Life (Tib. Tshe dpag du...
An original new perspective on the shared history of Burmese, Chinese, and Tibetan, with a particular focus on their phonological development.
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Glimpses of Tibetan Divination: Past and Present is the first book of its kind, in that it contains articles by a group of eminent scholars who approach the subject matter by investigating it through various facets and salient historical figures. Over the centuries, Tibetans developed many practices of prognostication and adapted many others from neighboring cultures and religions. In this way, Tibetan divination evolved into a vast field of ritual expertise that has been largely neglected in Tibetan Studies. The Tibetan repertoire of divinatory techniques is rich and immensely varied. Accordingly, the specimen of practices discussed in this volume—many of which remain in use today—merely serve as examples that offer glimpses of divination in Tibet. Contributors are Per Kværne, Brandon Dotson, Ai Nishida, Dan Martin, Petra Maurer, Charles Ramble, Donatella Rossi, Rolf Scheuermann, Alexander Smith, and Agata Bareja-Starzynska.
While providing unique and detailed information on early Tibeto-Burman languages and their contact and relationship to other languages, this book at the same time sets out to establish a field of Tibeto-Burman comparative-historical linguistics based on the classical Indo-European model.
“Dunhuang Manuscript Culture” explores the world of Chinese manuscripts from ninth-tenth century Dunhuang, an oasis city along the network of pre-modern routes known today collectively as the Silk Roads. The manuscripts have been discovered in 1900 in a sealed-off side-chamber of a Buddhist cave temple, where they had lain undisturbed for for almost nine hundred years. The discovery comprised tens of thousands of texts, written in over twenty different languages and scripts, including Chinese, Tibetan, Old Uighur, Khotanese, Sogdian and Sanskrit. This study centres around four groups of manuscripts from the mid-ninth to the late tenth centuries, a period when the region was an independent kingdom ruled by local families. The central argument is that the manuscripts attest to the unique cultural diversity of the region during this period, exhibiting—alongside obvious Chinese elements—the heavy influence of Central Asian cultures. As a result, it was much less ‘Chinese’ than commonly portrayed in modern scholarship. The book makes a contribution to the study of cultural and linguistic interaction along the Silk Roads.
There are more native speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages than of any other language family in the world. Our records of these languages are among the oldest for any human language, and the amount of active research on them has multiplied in the last few decades. Now in its second edition and fully updated to include new research, The Sino-Tibetan Languages includes overview articles on individual languages, with an emphasis on the less commonly described languages, as well as descriptions and comments on the subgroups in which they occur. There are overviews of the whole family on genetic classification and language contact, syntax and morphology, and also on word order typology. There are a...
Accompanying CD-ROM contains ... "images of Dunhuang Manuscripts from the Stein Collection in London."--CD-ROM label.