The Tibetan Tanjur

Throughout the first millennium CE all of India’s classical "outer" arts and sciences (including linguistics, medicine, astronomy, sociopolitical theory, ethics, art, and so on) as well as all of her classical "inner" arts and sciences (philosophy, psychology and mind science, meditation, yoga, and so on) engendered numerous renaissances across all of Asia. The knowledge comprising these arts and sciences was distilled and preserved in the thousands of scientific treatises (shastra) assembled at the great Indian Buddhist university libraries such as Nalanda, Vikramashila, and Odantapuri. It is estimated that these Indic treasuries amounted to over one hundred times the holdings of the Library of Alexandria. While much of the explicitly Buddhist tradition was later lost in India, essential treatises were systematically translated into Tibetan by teams of scholars during the 7th–12th centuries CE. The resulting collection, preserved as the Tibetan Tanjur (bstan 'gyur), consists of translations of over 3,600 classical Sanskrit works by over 700 Indian authors. The texts of the Tibetan Tanjur thus provide the essential key to unlock the knowledge not only of the classical Indian Buddhist arts and sciences but also of all the later Tibetan innovations which, rooted in this Indic tradition, were developed and refined for over a millennia in Tibet’s own monastic curricula.