Page:A Tibetan-English Dictionary with Sanskrit Synonyms.djvu/17



in December 1899 the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal handed over to us for revision the Tibetan Dictionary upon which Sarat Chandra Das had laboured for some dozen years, we found at our disposal a work embracing a mass of new and important collections on the language, the value of which was marred by two prominent characteristics—first, the material had been put together in somewhat heterogeneous fashion, hardly systematic enough for a dictionary; secondly, the vast amount of original matter had been throughout greatly interlarded with lengthy excerpts from Jäschke's Dictionary, not always separable from the new information, and this imparted a second-hand appearance to large portions of the work, which was, in reality, by no means deserved. Moreover, in this way, no attempt had been made to improve upon Jäschke's definitions of many of the commoner Buddhist philosophical terms or to incorporate the later results of European scholarship in these instances. On the other hand, one was very often gratified to find, in the case of the more difficult philosophical terminology, that the learned Bengali had gone to original and little-explored sources of native information, such as Tsongkhapa's Lam-rim Chhenmo, and, by extracts from the same, furnished valuable and novel particulars under those heads.

Accordingly, the task which the Revisors set themselves was directed mainly to counteracting the errors of judgment above indicated. Such a task proved one of a more laborious character than might be at first imagined; and the fact that the work of amendment and addition has taken them upwards of two years of incessant toil sufficiently evidences its difficulty.

First, has come the business of selection and excision. The religion and philosophy of Tibetan books are properly confined to the Bon cult and to Buddhism. There had been, however, a tendency here to draw in all manner of Hindu thought and mythology, because one or two works translated into Tibetan from the Sanskrit dealt with these matters. This tendency it seemed right to curb except in those instances, not at all infrequent, where the Vedic and Puranic Hinduism, in some measure, was bound up with, or bore upon, or explained, Buddhist belief or popular practice.