Tibetan Treasures of the Bodleian Library The Tibetan Subject Librarian, Charles Manson, reports

The Bodleian Library at Oxford holds a unique collection of hundreds of Tibetan blockprints and manuscripts, assembled by various explorers and scholars over a period of more than two

hundred years.

Currently, the old typewritten list of Tibetan books is being turned into a digital catalogue to make the Tibetan manuscripts and blockprints more easily searchable.

(Srid pa rgyud manuscript, from H.E. Richardson collection)

These precious Tibetan resources are still largely unexplored and are awaiting scholarly

attention. Tibetan Studies is a young academic field, and much more work needs to be done to fully appreciate the rich Tibetan literary heritage.

Charles Manson, the librarian in charge of the Tibetan collections,

gives a brief report on the resources at Oxford:

The Bodleian's collection of Tibetan manuscripts includes history, biography, meditation and ritual texts, as well as medical and astronomical manuscripts. The acquisitions include:

manuscripts obtained by Captain Samuel Turner of the East India Company when on a mission to the Panchen Lama in 1783-4, including correspondence relating to the mission, and notes on the Tibetan language;

102 manuscripts and block-books collected in the Indian Himalayas by German explorers Adolf, Hermann and Robert Schlagintweit;

131 volumes collected by Lieutenant Colonel Augustine Waddell, medical officer to the Younghusband Expedition of 1904. The collection includes two volumes of a manuscript prepared in the monastery of Shel-dkar in Southern Tibet (MSS. Tibet a. 15 (R), 23 (R)), which is important because of the part it plays in the history of the transmission of the Tibetan canon;

Tibetan manuscripts bequeathed by W.Y. Evans-Wentz in 1965. This includes the Bardo manuscript from which The Tibetan Book of the Dead was published. The manuscripts are being catalogued digitally, in the Bod Karchak project.

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