BIBLIOTHECA INDICA:
A
Collection of Oriental Works
PUBLISHED BY THE
ASIATIC SOCIETY OF BENGAL.
New Series, No. 1426.
MINOR TIBETAN TEXTS.
I.—THE SONG OF THE EASTERN SNOW-MOUNTAIN.
BY
JOHAN VAN MANEN.
CALCUTTA:
PRINTED AT THE BAPTIST MISSION PRESS,
AND PUBLISHED BY THE
ASIATIC SOCIETY, 1, PARK STREET.
1919.
PREFATORY NOTE.
Lewin, in his ‘Manual of Tibetan,’ 1879, preface, states: “Tibet and
its language are still comparatively unknown ... the familiar tongue of
the people, their folk-lore, songs and ballads are all unknown.”
Far from contradicting this saying, Jäschke, the greatest Tibetan
scholar of his time, stated two years later, in 1881, in the preface to
the third edition of his Tibetan Dictionary: “(To) the student who has
for immediate object to learn how to read and write the Tibetan
language ... existing dictionaries (are) almost if not quite useless.”
Since Jäschke’s third edition, two new Tibetan dictionaries have
appeared. Walsh in an article in the J.A.S.B., Vol. 72, Pt. 1, n. 2,
1903, reviewing the last one of these, the one by Sarat Chandra Das,
says, p. 78: “Although the present Dictionary has fulfilled what it
purposed to be, namely, a complete Dictionary of literary Tibetan, so
far as our present sources of knowledge go, it does not fulfil the
requirements of a standard dictionary of the entire language, and the
standard dictionary of the modern and current Tibetan language has yet
to be written.”
Laufer, ‘Roman einer Tibetischen Königin,’ 1911, p. 27 et seq., says:
“We have here to open a road through the jungles, unaided and by
ourselves; we have to work through text after text and note down
expressions and idioms as we meet them,” etc.
Grünwedel in ‘Padmasambhava und Verwandtes,’ 1912, pp. 9–10, endorses
Laufer’s remarks and adds about the difficulty of translating from
Tibetan: “Ignorance regarding the subject-matter, mistakes and
misunderstandings in the text itself, and, finally, the insufficiently
explored idiomatic element of the language, of which the history is as
yet poorly known, these are the main shoals.... Of all the dictionaries
only Jäschke’s has really achieved something in the matter of idiom.”
As a matter of fact the printed materials available for the home
student do not at present enable him, if without the help of a native
teacher, to translate, accurately and without skipping the
difficulties, any modern Tibetan book (not even the so-called Tibetan
Primers in use in Darjeeling) if such books do not happen to belong to
those excerpted in the existing dictionaries. Jäschke’s, which is the
best from this point of view, mentions only 25 titles of texts used as
his sources. Comparing this with the more than 1000 titles quoted by
Skeat as the sources for the material for his Etymological Dictionary
of the English language we at once see the inadequacy of such material
in the case of Tibetan.
It is true that at present more showy results can be obtained by the
wholesale translation of texts (more with a view to making known their
general contents, than to the furnishing of a precise philological,
lexicographical and grammatical analysis), and it is certain that the
results of such work of translation would be more attractive and
interesting to the wider public. Yet one of the most valuable
contributions towards laying a sound basis for future Tibetan
scholarship is the painstaking, laborious and to a certain extent
inglorious and humdrum drudging away at small texts with scrupulous
attention to the smallest minutiae, for a secure fixing of illustrative
examples by co-ordinating correctness of text, full discussion of
meanings, sharp formulation of definitions and subtle analysis of all
questions and problems involved.
The following essay is a first contribution towards an attempt to serve
such an ideal.