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E. Steinkellner
Samdhinirmocanasūtra
tools for studying it and demonstrating it as true and authoritative are thus provided with a detailed and elaborate terminology along with the definitions of the terms whose translation and interpretation would seem to be a major task for those monks and scholars who worked under royal orders to create the appropriate religious idiom.
This is the achievement that may seem to be the necessary preparation for that work that can be considered as the conclusion of these scholarly efforts: the compilation of dictionaries and related working tools. When these more handy and useful works had been compiled, their sources were no longer as important as before and this may have been one of the causes for the eventual loss of some of them. Of course this is only a hypothetical after-thought and the Samdhinirmocanasūtra-literature will almost certainly turn out to be a source among others, but an important one nevertheless. Thus in order to advance the study of the development of the early Tibetan Buddhist vocabularies and semantics a study of these commentaries on the Samdhinirmocana. sütra that can be connected with Khri Sron Ide btsan's historical decision to establish Buddhism in the country seems to be unavoidable.
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