Old Tibetan Studies, edited by Cristina Scherrer-Schaub, is an inquiry into secular and religious Old Tibetan documents from Central Asia and Tibet. The volume is written with the intent to confront facts and textualization and contribute to the clarification of particular aspects of the administrative and legislative organization, the ecclesiastical institution, and the religious, monastic, intellectual and material culture of Old Tibet and its borderlands. The material is critically examined from different perspectives, focusing on classical disciplines (history, linguistics, lexicography, philology, codicology and diplomatics). With contributions by Roland Bielmeier, Anne Chayet, Helga Uebach, Kazushi Iwao, Siglinde Dietz, Yoshiro Imaeda, Bianca Horlemann, Brandon Dotson,Tsuguhito Takeuchi and Cristina Scherrer-Schaub.

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Monastery Rules discusses the position of the monasteries in pre-1950s Tibetan Buddhist societies and how that position was informed by the far-reaching relationship of monastic Buddhism with Tibetan society, economy, law, and culture. Jansen focuses her study on monastic guidelines, or bca’ yig. The first study of its kind to examine the genre in detail, the book contains an exploration of its parallels in other Buddhist cultures, its connection to the Vinaya, and its value as socio-historical source-material. The guidelines are witness to certain socio-economic changes, while also containing rules that aim to change the monastery in order to preserve it. Jansen argues that the monastic institutions’ influence on society was maintained not merely due to prevailing power-relations, but also because of certain deep-rooted Buddhist beliefs.

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. With papers by C. Bauer on Burmese and Mon, C. Beckwith on Old Tibetan syllable margins, B. Zeisler on Tibetan case marking, R. Yanson on Burmese historical phonology, G. Jacques on Tangut rimes, K. Iwasa on early Lolo manuscripts, V. Kasevich on the causative in Tibeto-Burman, and C. Beckwith on Old Tibetan and Old Chinese reconstruction. With an extensive Introduction to theoretical problems of the linguistics of Tibeto-Burman and other East and Southeast Asian languages.

The papers provide access for the first time to Tibetan documents and practices from the period of the tenth to fifteenth century.

This book, the first scholarly publication in the West to provide detailed documentation of modern life in contemporary Tibet, presents the cutting-edge field work carried out by an interdisciplinary group of researchers studying caste, pop music, media, painting, education, economics, childbirth and environment in Tibetan communities today.

This volume provides essential readings in the emerging interdisciplinary field of Tibetan literary studies. Chapters range from discussions of individual contemporary texts to theoretical interventions in literary and Tibetan studies.

This volume focuses on the interface between Mongolian and Tibetan cultures and aims to create a platform to encourage the development of new forms of scholarship across geographical and disciplinary boundaries. This forum lets new materials emerge and brings to the fore a variety of different approaches to studying Mongolian and Tibetan cultures and societies. The papers in this volume deal not only with the substantial Mongolian contribution to and engagement with Tibetan Buddhism, but also with multiple readings of shared history and religion, reconstruction of traditions, shifting ethnic boundaries and the broader political context of the Mongolian-Tibetan relationship.