Tibetan

The period from the second half of the 19 th through the first third of the 20 th century marks the highest development of Buryat Buddhism. Once a derivative and integral part of the Tibetan-Mongol Buddhist world, by the end of the 19 th century Buddhism in Transbaikalia was subject to conditions that differed sharply from those in the remaining Tibetan Buddhist world. Accelerating modernization and the development of capitalist relations during this period of Russian history, resulted in a revision of the center's politics towards its national minorities, thereby exacerbating internal contradictions within the centralized Siberian Buddhist monastic institution.

In 1918, the former head of the Kudun datsan, Sandan Tsydenov, finding himself in the eastern regions of Transbaikalia after 20 years of solitary mediation, laid the foundation for one of the most surprising movements in the history of Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhism by founding an independent theocratic government. Despite the fact that this Buddhist theocracy was crushed, and its leader arrested by the authorities within a few months, followers of the Balagat (supporters of Tsydenov’s theocracy) movement opposed the Soviet government until the middle of the 1930's. In addition, indirectly, Sandan Tsydenov's ideas continue to influence members of the Russian intelligentsia to the present day: I am referring to followers of the Buryat Tibetologist, Bidya Dandaron, who founded a religio-philosophical school of neo-Buddhism, and considered himself Tsydenov's spiritual son and successor.

Despite the considerable and long-reaching consequences of Sandan Tsydenov's actions, scholars still know very little about the theocratic government founded in the Kudun valleys and even less about the religio-philosophical views of its founder. An extensive legendary tradition has developed around the figure of Tsydenov, further obscuring his true portrait. Until recently, Sandan Tsydenov's personal archive, confiscated by the Buryat People's Duma, was considered lost. Recently, files were found in the Buryat History Museum archives, containing an entire series of valuable materials written in Tibetan and Mongolian, which reveal the philosophical foundations of the Balagat theocratic movement and its historical development. One of these documents is Sandan Tsydenov's diary during his trip to Moscow, as a member of a delegation of Buddhist monks invited to the coronation of Nicholas II in 1896, where Tsydenov grounded arguments for the future theocracy in ideas about the essence of monarchy and the sacredness of this governmental form. Among other materials, the most interesting is Tsydenov's philosophical notebook, completely devoted to his conceptions of power, government, monarchic privileges and theocratic forms of government supported by quotes from canonical and non-canonical Buddhist texts.

The reasons for the rise of the theocratic movement, headed by Tsydenov, can be found in the clash between conservative and modernist models for Buryat ethnic development in the first third of the 20 th century. The so-called Volost reforms sparked processes of political nation-building, leading to the preeminence of a new generation of young Buryat intellectuals, who based their goals for the national rebirth of the Buryats on progressive European values. To this end, they united with a faction of Buddhist clergy, gathered around the official Buddhist administration, who advocated radical liberal reforms in administrative and economic spheres of the Buddhist church. Although officially part of the conservative Buddhist movement opposed to these liberal reforms, the Balagat leaders suggested an alternative form of government, sharply differing from the conservative movement's ideology of monarchic restoration. With the fall of the Romanovs, Tsydenov's piety for the monarchy, emotionally expressed in all his essays, transformed into the idea of theocracy. The sacred character of the Russian emperors, who in the eyes of Buddhists were the incarnations of White Tara, denied legitimacy to any form of power not endowed with religious blessing. The fall of the monarchy created a vacuum in the perception of thousands of believers which Tsydenov offered to fill with a local Buddhist form of government, declaring himself Dharmaraja of the three worlds. However, the use of traditional Buddhist terminology should not be taken as evidence of an archaic form of government. Preserved official administrative documents of the Balagat government (meeting protocols, decrees, materials from nomenclature commissions, etc.) demonstrate its debt to European governmental traditions and their inherent parliamentarianism.

The theocratic movement reveals fundamental contradictions among the ranks of the Buryat Buddhist clergy, related to the administrative system of the Buddhist church in Russia – the institution of the Pandito Khambo-Lama. Tsydenov's attempt to secure the preeminence of his power by establishing a line of reincarnations (the first of which is supposed to have been Bidya Dandaron) demonstrated a crisis in the system of electing monastic leadership. Despite the fact that this opposition ended after the destruction of the Buddhist church in the 1930's, Buryatia is once again undergoing a new phase of Buddhist development and Tsydenov's ideas are again evoking interest in modern Buryat society.

2008, Cathy Cantwell and Robert Mayer.  "The Dunhuang Phur pa Corpus: A Survey", in Almogi, Orna, ed. Contributions to Tibetan Buddhist Literature. PIATS 2006: Tibetan Studies: Proceedings of the Eleventh Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Königswinter 2006. Beiträge zur Zentralasienforschung 14. Halle: International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies (pp. 248-276)

Предлагаем вашему вниманию второй выпуск журнала Tartaria Magna (Тартария Магна), в котором мы продолжаем тему противостояния и компромисса между "своим" и "чужим". В этом выпуске представлены исследования авторов, так или иначе касающиеся вопросов конструирования и разрушения социальных границ религиями. Второй выпуск Tartaria Magna носит название "Мир "своих" и "чужих": Духовные братья, священные враги" ( www.tartaria-magna.ru ). Как и круг поднимаемых проблем, исследовательская география выпуска традиционно широка - от Прибалтики до Тибета, от Закавказья до Забайкалья. В выпуске представлены исследования авторов из разных стран, занимающихся изучением различных народов и культур, но всех их объединяет высокий исследовательский уровень, проблематика номера и... журнал Tartaria Magna.

The Mongolic-speaking Kalmyks currently inhabiting the steppes of the Volga region have Central Asian ancestry and are organized into the tribal groups. The genetic relationships among these tribes and their origin have remained obscure. We analyzed 17 short tandem repeat and 44 binary polymorphisms of Y-chromosome in 426 individuals mainly from three major tribes of the Kalmyks (the Torguuds, Dörwöds and Khoshuuds). Among these tribes, the Dörwöds and Torguuds, as well as the Kalmyks collectively as an ethnic group, showed relatively close genetic affinities to each other and to the Mongols and Altaian Kazakhs, whereas the Khoshuuds were clearly separated from all of them, gathering with the Manchu, Tibetans or Evenks (depending on the algorithm used to calculate genetic distances). The genetic results also indicate that paternal gene flow from East Europeans to the Kalmyks is very little, despite their cohabitation in the North Caspian Steppe during the last 380 years. The occurrence of unique cluster of N1c-Tat haplotypes in the Khoshuuds, which dates to about 340 years and is likely to have East European ancestry, is considered as a result of interethnic contacts occurred soon after the appearance of the Kalmyk tribes in the Volga-Ural region.

First issue of new academic journal. Studia Turkica Mongolica Tibetica Manchurica Sibirica Russica et cetera.

Tartaria Magna is a peer reviewed e-journal in Russian. Editors accept papers and reviews in English and provide Russian translation. We may consider publication of the papers and reviews that have been published in other journals within the period of 3 years. More info: www.tartaria-magna.ru

Largely through the efforts of Scott DeLancey the grammatical category “mirative” has gained currency in linguistics. DeLancey bases his elaboration of this category on a misunderstanding of the semantics of h. dug in “Lhasa” Tibetan. Rather than showing “surprising information”, linguists working on Tibetan have long described ḥdug as a sensory evidential. Much of the evidence DeLancey and Aikhenvald present for mirativity in other languages is also susceptible to explanation in terms of sensory evidence or appears close to Lazard’s “mediative” (1999) or Johanson’s “indirective” (2000). Until an independent grammatical category for “new information” is described in a way which precludes analysis in terms of sensory evidence or other well established evidential categories, mirativity should be excluded from the descriptive arsenal of linguistic analysis.

'Indigenous elements in Tibetan tantric religion'. In  Mongolo-Tibetica Pragensia ’14, Volume 7, No. 2, Special Issue "Indigenous Elements in Tibetan Religions" Edited by Daniel Berounský. Charles University, Prague, 2014.  This paper is an attempted overview of the still only partially understood topic of indigenous elements within Tibetan tantric religion, with particular focus on the underlying historical and cultural dynamics. Drawing on the research Cathy Cantwell and I have done together in recent years, and above all greatly indebted to the discoveries of many other schol- ars, it was inspired by the need to communicate the topic to non-specialist academic colleagues, on the one hand avoiding excessive technical obscurantism, but on the other hand utilising up to date research.

In this paper, Nāgārjuna’s philosophical interpretation of the terms kāraṇa and kārya is analysed after having methodologically confined the specific field of interest to the MMK. From the study of all the occurrences of kāraṇa and kārya in the MMK (listed in paragraph 2), it emerges that Nāgārjuna makes use of these two terms to refer to skandhas as causes (kāraṇa) of further skandhas as effects (kārya), hence conveying with this words the idea of, so to speak, subjectivity and (re)birth. From the principal commentaries on the MMK (particularly Bhāviveka and Candrakīrti), we know also that, even when the reference of kāraṇa and kārya to skandhas is not explicitly pointed out by Nāgārjuna, it nonetheless can be inferred from the peculiar context in which these terms are employed.
This conclusion seems to be confirmed also by the crosscheck analysis of the philosophical usage of the parallel terms hetu and phala, which refer either to, so to speak, objective (i.e., concerning general bhāvas) causes and effects, or – in the case of phala as consequence of karman/kriyā – to moral results (these two meanings are confirmed also by some passages from the Vigrahavyāvartanī), but in no cases Nāgārjuna makes recurse to hetu and phala to refer to what could be called a subjective (i.e., concerning skandhas) level of causality.
To the paper an addendum is added, in which the commentaries on MMK 8.4 are taken into consideration. From this excursus it appears that at least Buddhapālita, Bhāviveka and Candrakīrti, by ‘overinterpreting’ the meaning of hetu in the kārika, are consequently forced to readapt the philosophical significance of kāraṇa and kārya in a way that does not fit so much with Nāgārjuna’s original message.

Мир «своих» и «чужих». По праву кровного родства: родовые структуры и брачные стратегии в прошлом и настоящем народов Евразии / The world of ‘Self’ and ‘Others’. By Right of Consanguinity: Clan structures and matrimonial strategies in past and present of Eurasian peoples

В этом выпуске мы предлагаем авторам и читателям рассмотреть проблему взаимоотношений между «своими» и «чужими» в рамках такого исследовательского направления как kinship studies.
Здесь, как ни в какой другой дисциплине, можно обнаружить нагляднейший и в то же время нетривиальный материал, который дает нам возможность изучать механизмы социального группирования и отчуждения / исключения. Различные системы родства и соответствующие им терминологии и иерархии могут показать внимательному наблюдателю как сходства, так и различия в стратегии и тактике интеграции / дифференциации сообществ, а метафоричность языка этих систем позволяет нам вернуться, возможно, на более высоком уровне обобщения, и к масштабу макро-анализа.

In this issue of “Tartaria Magna” we offer our authors and readers to consider a problem of interrelations between “insiders” and “outsiders” within kinship studies research trend. Here, as in no other scholarly discipline, one may come across most illustrative and, at the same time, unconventional research material giving us a chance to study mechanisms of social grouping and estrangement/exclusion. Various system of kinship and their relevant terminologies and hierarchies may expose to an attentive eye both similarities and differences in the strategy and tactics of community integration/differentiation. The metaphorical character of these systems allows us to return, perhaps, at a higher level of generalization, to macro-analysis.

In this paper we present the results of a study of the tonal adaptation of a corpus of c. 300 Mandarin and 40 English loanwords in Lhasa Tibetan drawn from Yu et al.’s (1980) Colloquial Lhasa Tibetan-Chinese Dictionary. Our principal finding is that no equivalence is made between the Mandarin tones /English stress contours and Lhasa Tibetan tones. Instead, tones are assigned by a combination of default rules of Tibetan grammar and UG enhancement processes familiar from the tonogenesis literature.

The article presents Go rams pa's interpretation and classification of cognizable object as explained by Sa skya Pan ˙ d ˙ ita in his famous Tshad ma rigs gter. The text consists of introduction to the translation of the original, translation of Go ram pa's commentary to the first chapter of Tshad ma rigs gter, edition of the original, and outline of the Tibetan text.

Religious Studies 314 is an introduction to classical literary Tibetan ( yig skad or yig rtsom bod yig). Classical literary Tibetan is the basis of Tibetan written culture that is common to educated people of all regions of Tibet, as well as the countries where Vajrayana Buddhism is established. Classical literary Tibetan developed during the time period from the 12th to the 19th century.

Robert Linrothe. 2015. A Group of Mural Paintings from the 1930s in A mdo Reb gong in Gerald Roche, Keith Dede, Fernanda Pirie, and Benedict Copps (eds) Asian Highlands Perspectives 37 Centering  the Local, A Festschrift for Dr. Charles Kevin Stuart on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday, 279-295.

Because of the high reputation in Reb gong of the Seng ge
shong monasteries (upper and lower), I naturally visited both of them several times while investigating contemporary Reb gong painting in the late 1990s and early 2000s. My primary base of operations was Tongren (Rong bo) where I had forged a friendship which endures to this day with a learned and devout friend and kalyāṇamitra, Dge 'dun A khu dpal bzang.  We started interviewing various people related to the arts, including the monk Skal bzang blo gsal of the Dga' ldan phun tshogs gling Monastery at the Seng ge shong ma mgo (lower) temple. We visited Skal bzang blo gsal in mid-January of 2001, and then again on the third of February 2002. Being a knowledgeable impresario and manager of younger painters, Skal bzang blo gsal was thus a fount of information about the reach of
Seng ge shong artists into the surrounding areas of A mdo. In
addition, he took us into those buildings of his monastery with
artwork, and allowed us to take photographs. In 2001, I had already noticed that on the porch of the Byams pa lha khang 'Maitreya Hall' there were paintings which looked to me to be older than recent paintings. At that time, based on the high quality and subtle shades of the pigments, I thought that they might be nineteenth century. It was common knowledge that the sculptures in the Byams pa lha khang, believed to have been built in the early eighteenth century, had been destroyed between 1958 and the Cultural Revolution. The recreation of the present main statue of Maitreya was overseen in 1982 by one of  the premier artists in the region, the late Rgya mtsho, along with a  team of collaborators. Because the interior of the shrine became a granary for the village during 'the troubles', the architecture itself survived, though its interior murals were ruined in the process, and have since been repainted. The porch murals, however, may have been covered, and so were protected.

An examination of the principal cultural and musical associations of the sgra-snyan, examining the terminological and organological features, cultural and religious meanings and musical use of the instrument. Reformatted edition of the original 1991 dissertation text submitted for Masters of Music.

Several Tibeto-Burman languages show a peculiar pattern of distribution of copulas and/or finite verb forms, in which one set occurs with first person subjects in statements, second person subjects in questions, and in complement clauses of verba dicendi when the complement and main clause subjects are coreferential, and another set in all other contexts. When the evidence for and against reconstructing the system at the branch or family level is assessed, it appears that this “conjunct/disjunct” pattern is a recent secondary innovation in all of the languages in which it is found. It probably developed independently at least twice, in Tibetan and Akha; its occurrence in other languages may represent Tibetan influence.

The relationship between minority languages and translator training programmes is a very new and under-researched area of inquiry in Translation Studies. The People’s Republic of China, which has 55 different minorities within its borders, is an ideal country in which to examine this issue. This paper focuses on the Tibetan language, one of the minority languages in China for which translator training programmes are available. The paper first provides a brief overview of translator training programmes in China in general, and then examines the situation of Tibetan-Chinese training programmes in Tibet and other parts of China, linking these to the job market for translators in these regions. The paper then explores a unique parallel development outside of China of Tibetan-English translator training programmes that have been established for students of Tibetan Buddhism who wish to train as interpreters or translators. The contrast of these two widely differing sets of training programmes reveals the divergent market forces at work that spur the development of such programmes, and also highlights the role that translator programmes may play in the survival of lesser-used languages.

Cicero says, in On The Nature of the Gods (De Natura Deorum, 45 BCE), that the word "religion" (Latin religio) derives not as usually thought from re-ligare, which would mean "to reconnect" (e.g. man with god) but from re-legere "to re-collect", "to re-member", "to re-read". In order to have a true relationship with our sacred books, including the book of the world, and the book of oneself, one must re-read them. Re-reading also implies recreation. The following are my re-readings of a few traditional sources.

In this paper we present the results of a study of the tonal adaptation of a corpus of c. 300 Mandarin and 40 English loanwords in Lhasa Tibetan drawn from Yu et al.’s (1980) Colloquial Lhasa Tibetan-Chinese Dictionary. Our principal finding is that no equivalence is made between the Mandarin tones /English stress contours and Lhasa Tibetan tones. Instead, tones are assigned by a combination of default rules of Tibetan grammar and UG enhancement processes familiar from the tonogenesis literature.

A recent paper on the prehistory of the Tibetan verbal system by Guillaume Jacques (2012), in keeping with many previous authorities, presents Tibetan verbs as occurring in pairs, with a voiced intransitive and a voice-alternating transitive member. However, as noticed by Uray, Tibetan verbs occur in triplets with no relationship between voicing and transitivity.

Important considerations on the expression of wish. Makes an interesting distinction between "speaker wish" and "subject wish", illustrating with examples. Ideas presented here are now developed in the mān and nūman articles of the Hittite Dictionary of the Oriental Institute (L-N).