Reviews Of Different Books

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REVIEWS 319 Stuart Buck, Tibetan-English Dictionary with Supplement. Washington, Catholic University of America Press. 1969. xviii + 833 pp. $25.00. This is the third dictionary of modern Tibetan to be published during the last seven years. I think that it would be generally agreed that a dictionary such as this should take into consideration all the material published before. Unfortunately Buck's dictionary does not. Besides the vocabulary of Nationalities Pictorial and, in the Supplement, that of the Glossary of New Terms, Buck has used the dictionaries of A. Csoma de Koros, Jaschke, S. Ch. Das and some other dictionaries, but he does not seem to have made use of two dictionaries which record the language used in modern Tibetan literature (B. Semicov and others, Moscow, 1963; E. Richter, Leipzig, 1966). And what is more, he does not mention the existence of these materials and we gain the impression that the work of Tibetologists of the USSR and the People's Democracies in the fields of Tibetan lexicography, grammar and phonetics has been completely overlooked (K. Sedlacek - CSSR; E. Richter and J. Schubert - GDR; Geza Uray and A. Rona-Tas - Hungary; B. Semicov - USSR). While referring to the works of the first Hungarian Tibetologist, Csoma de Koros (a grammar and a dictionary), S. Buck does not mention the works of the first Russian Tibetologist, I. J. Schmidt (also a grammar and a dictionary, 1839 and 1843), although they still provide many useful materials and I. J. Schmidt was the first to arrange his dictionary in the order of the Tibetan alphabet. Schmidt's method has been accepted by subsequent compilers of Tibetan dictionaries: Jaschke, S. Ch. Das and all others, including S. Buck himself. We cannot imagine that S. Buck, as a Tibetologist, does not know these works. What is more, S. Buck has apparently not made use of the recently published dictionaries of modern Tibetan. For example, of the new terms formed in modern Tibetan with the help of rin-lugs only thirty-three are listed by S. Buck: under ka: 2, kha: 3, ga: 4, na: 1, ta 1, pa: 5, pha: 1, ma: 8, tsa: 1, za: 1, ra: 3, la: 2, sa: 1. However the dictionaries by Semicov and others and by Richter list ninety-five terms formed with the aid of rin-lugs. This example may suffice to show that S. Buck has not used all the opportunities he had, although numerous others could be mentioned. All Tibetologists will suffer as the result of Buck's failure to use the works of Tibetologists from the USSR and the GDR. We hope that S. Buck will take these remarks into consideration when bringing out a second edition of his dictionary and that at the same time he will omit the religious and philosophical terminology. The terms cited by him occasionally and without any apparent system are not sufficient to translate classical Buddhist literature. Many of his translations are not in accordance with our present-day interpretation of Buddhist philosophical terms (chos, chos thams-cad,'du-byed,'du-ses, ston-pa-nid, 'dus-byas, etc.). In the USSR a "Tibetan-Russian-English Dictionary with Sanskrit equivalents" by the late Professor G. de Roerich in three volumes with a supplement by B. Semicov forming a fourth volume, will soon be published. We hope that this dictionary will enable us to translate almost all Tibetan philosophical treatises. It would render unnecessary the unsystematic introduction of these terms into a dictionary of modern Tibetan. Ulan-Ude B. Semicov Orientalis; No. 150, inscriptions, lire inscription; d'ancienne, lire l'ancienne; No. 157 document, lire documents; No. 201 Jatakamala, lire Jatakamala; No. 204 Gaudensia, lire Gandensia. Le travail de J. Filliozat ("Paleographie", L'Inde classique, Tome II, 1953, pp. 665-712) n'est pas mentionne.