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Sacred Texts: Buddhism

Chapter VIII. The Sacred Literature

19th Century BuddhologyBuddhist IconographyTibetan Buddhism

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This is a chapter from a 19th-century European scholarly work on Tibetan Buddhism and literature, situated within the tradition of Orientalist philology and religious studies. It describes the two great Tibetan canonical compilations — the Kanjur (108 volumes of the Buddha's teachings) and Tanjur (225 volumes of doctrine and miscellany) — explaining their contents, divisions, printing history, and distribution across Central Asian monasteries and European libraries. A central critical claim is that Tibetan translators compromised the authenticity of Sanskrit source texts by interlacing their own sectarian commentaries into the translations, which the author argues is the primary reason original Buddhism has remained so poorly understood in the West. The chapter also chronicles the emergence of Tibetan studies in Europe, crediting the Hungarian scholar Csoma de Kőrös as the discipline's true founder for producing the first Tibetan dictionary and grammar (Calcutta, 1832), while dismissing earlier European claims to knowledge of the language as grossly exaggerated. It surveys which European and Indian institutions hold copies of the Kanjur and Tanjur, noting gaps and the absence of published catalogues, and touches on native Tibetan literary production beginning with works attributed to the 7th-century king Srongtsan Gampo and flourishing from the 14th century onward.

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