ABOUT THE BOOK:
Bon is one of the pre-Buddhist religions of Tibet. It has been defined in a variety of ways, but regardless of how we define it, we can properly say that its culture has penetrated Tibetan culture from ancient times to the present day. For our deeper understanding of Tibetan culture, Bon is thus indispensable. This volume is a part of the results of the International Symposium entitled New Horizons in Bon Studies held in 1999 at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan. The purpose of this symposium was to discuss the Bon related themes from all aspects, such as anthropology, folklore, Buddhist studies, religious studies, cosmology, philology and linguistics to establish interfaces among various disciplines and to construct a common groundwork for the Bon studies. The edited fruits of the symposium are shown in this book, which are categorized as Bon and its relationship to Buddhism, rDzogs-chen, myths and rituals, social and anthropological approach to the Bonpo monasteries and their lay communities, and above all Bon in a more wider context. The linguistic studies on Zhangzhung and related Himalayan languages will separately appear as the next issue of this series.
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
SAMTEN G. KARMAY was born in Amdo, north-eastern Tibet. He attended Bonpo monasteries first and then studied in Drepung, a Buddhist monastery in Central Tibet. In 1959, he left Tibet for India where he began to print Tibetan texts. In 1961 he took up a research post at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University from where he obtained his M.Phil and Ph.D degrees. In 1980 he entered the National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris where he occupies the post of Director of Research in history and anthropology. In 1996 he was elected president of the International Association of Tibetan Studies (IATS). He has written number of books including The Great Perfection, J. Brill 1989; Secret Visions of the Fifth Dalai Lama, London Serindia 1989 and about sixty articles on Tibetan religion, history and ethnology.
YASUHIKO NAGANO was born in 1946 in Saitama, Japan. He Studied French linguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and continued his study at the Graduate School, University of Tokyo until he was nominated as a fellow of the Tibetan Seminar at the Toyo Bunko (Oriental Library). He left that in 1977 when he joined the Ph.D. program in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1983, he obtained his doctoral degree. His major research is on Tibeto-Burman historical linguistics, with special focus on Tibetan and Gyalrong. His main publications are: A Historical Study of the rGyarong Verb System, A Morphological Index of Classical Tibetan, New Horizons in Tibeto-Burman Morphosyntax and Time, Language and Cognition. He is a professor of linguistics at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan and has been pioneering an international project on Bon studies in partnership with Dr. Samten G. Karmay of CNRS, Paris, France. |
