Bellezza John Vincent, Death and Beyond in Ancient Tibet. Archaic Concepts and Practices in a Thousand-Year-Old Illuminated Funerary Manuscript and Old Tibetan Funerary Documents of Gathang Bumpa and Dunhuang

As indicated by the title, Death and the Beyond has an overarching theme (“the eschatological patterns and ritual constructs of death rites in ancient Tibet”, p. 5), but falls into three distinct parts, defined by the three categories of documents studied by the author. Briefly stated, the documents are : 1. A manuscript, probably originally a scroll, consisting of illustrated sections, now only partially preserved, dated by Bellezza (p. 15) to the eleventh or the first half of the twelfth ce..

Henrion-Dourcy Isabelle, Le théâtre ache lhamo. Jeux et enjeux d’une tradition tibétaine

Seldom indeed is it appropriate to use the term “definitive work”. In the case of this massive volume, the fruit of ten years of focused research by the Belgian anthropologist Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy, it is entirely justified. It is more than unlikely that it will be replaced by a similar work in the future, for several reasons, the most important one being that the performance of Tibetan “opera” (ache lhamo or lhamo), in its traditional, i.e. pre-1959 form – the subject of her book – would n..

Gyatso Janet, Being human in a Buddhist world. An intellectual history of medicine in early modern Tibet

Occasionally a book appears which has a lasting impact, irrevocably altering our way of perceiving a given field of research. In Tibetan studies, one such book is R.-A. Stein, Recherches sur l’épopée et le barde au Tibet (Paris, 1959), which by its unique erudition and multi-faceted approach to the Gesar epic not only established this vast corpus of oral as well as written literature as a central concern in Tibetan studies, but deeply influenced the perception of Tibetan history and culture i..

Blondeau Anne-Marie, Meyer Fernand, Robin Françoise, Lhadze Namgyel & Tenzin Samphel (eds.), Dictionnaire thématique français-tibétain du tibétain parlé (langue standard). vol. 2. L’Homme, fonctions sensorielles et langage

This is the second volume resulting from the Dictionnaire thématique project. The first volume, focusing on L’Homme. Anatomie, fonctions motrices et viscérales, appeared in 2001, so this is un travail de longue haleine. The present volume, however, not only deals with a much more complex semantic field than the first, but the linguistic presentation is more complex as well. As the title of the volumes indicates, they deal with spoken Tibetan, more specifically the dialect of Central Tibet, th..