This book is the first collection and translation in English of Rolf Stein's groundbreaking series of articles on Tibetan history, Tibetica antiqua. Drawing on the earliest available sources, Stein discusses the Tibetan transition to Buddhism, a transition influenced by both Indian and Chinese culture and cultural competition.

Tibetica antiqua represents the seminal work on Tibetan religious history by one of the foremost Tibetologists of the twentieth century. Herein, Stein discusses the cultural and religious interactions among Tibet, India, and China which resulted in what we now consider "Tibetan Buddhism" from the point of view of our earliest sources, the Dunhuang manuscripts. Stein first discusses the basic tool of religious language, and the extent to which translations from Chinese, often apocryphal, scriptures competed with translations from Sanskrit. Stein also analyzes evidence for the introduction of Buddhism to Tibet, as well as what a pre-Buddhist religion may have looked like, as distinct from modern Bon. Here, these groundbreaking articles are for the first time in the English language. They have been substantially updated, and supplemented with additional material from Stein's lectures at the Collège de France.

It is rarely appreciated how much of the history of Eurasian medicine in the premodern period hinges on cross-cultural interactions and knowledge transmissions. Using manuscripts found in key Eurasian nodes of the medieval world – Dunhuang, Kucha, the Cairo Genizah and Tabriz – the book analyses a number of case-studies of Eurasian medical encounters, giving a voice to places, languages, people and narratives which were once prominent but have gone silent. This is an important book for those interested in the history of medicine and the transmissions of knowledge that have taken place over the course of global history.

The Tibetan Gesar epic has known countless retellings, translations, and academic studies. The Many Faces of Ling Gesar, presents its historical, cultural, and literary aspects for the first time in a single volume for both general readers and specialists.

Trade flowed across Eurasia, around the Indian Ocean, and over the Mediterranean for millennia, but in the early modern period, larger parts of the globe became connected through these established trade routes. Knowledge, embodied in various people, materials, texts, objects, and practices, also moved and came together along these routes in hubs of exchange where different social and cultural groups intersected and interacted. Entangled Itineraries traces this movement of knowledge across the Eurasian continent from the early years of the Common Era to the nineteenth century, following local goods, techniques, tools, and writings as they traveled and transformed into new material and intellectual objects and ways of knowing. Focusing on nonlinear trajectories of knowledge in motion, this volume follows itineraries that weaved in and out of busy, crowded cosmopolitan cities in China; in the trade hubs of Kucha and Malacca; and in centers of Arabic scholarship, such as Reyy and Baghdad, which resonated in Bursa, Assam, and even as far as southern France. Contributors explore the many ways in which materials, practices, and knowledge systems were transformed and codified as they converged, swelled, at times disappeared, and often reemerged anew.

This book explores the Buddhist role in the formation of Tibetan religious thought and identity. In three major sections, the author examines Tibet's eighth-century conversion, sources of dispute within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and the continuing revelation of the teaching in both doctrine and myth.

This book explores the Buddhist role in the formation of Tibetan religious thought and identity. In three major sections, the author examines Tibet's eighth-century conversion, sources of dispute within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and the continuing revelation of the teaching in both doctrine and myth.