Translating the Cult of the Book: Publishing and Performing the Fifth Dalai Lama’s The Wish-Fulfilling King from Lhasa to Beijing

In 1673 the Fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobzang Gyatso (Ngag dbang blo bzang rgya mtsho, 1617–1682) composed The Wish-Fulfilling King (Yid bzhin dbang rgyal), a ritual manual for the worship of the seven buddhas of healing. In the first hundred years after its composition, the Fifth Dalai Lama’s ritual text was published in the original Tibetan in no less than five different woodblock editions. It had also been translated into Mongolian and Chinese and published in several woodblock editions in those languages. Most of these woodblock editions were produced by imperially sponsored Tibetan Buddhist temples in Beijing. The ritual described in the text was performed in monasteries and temples across central Tibet, Mongolia, and in Beijing. This article examines the history of this text, its transmission, and what those tells us about the culture of Tibetan Buddhist books in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly as they relate to the Mayāyāna ‘cult of the book.’

The Hanoi Reprint of the Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain (1772) and the Printing of Buddhist Works in Northern Vietnam at the End of the Eighteenth Century

The Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain is a popular Buddhist narrative in prosimetric form that was transmitted to Vietnam from China and reprinted in Hanoi with imperial sanction in 1772. The historical background of the Hanoi reprint demonstrates that this text had much higher status in Vietnam than in China. In Vietnam it was regarded as an authoritative Buddhist scripture. The case of the reprint of the Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain reveals the role of Buddhist monasteries as centers of woodblock printing in Vietnam, which still remains understudied in current research. The growth of printing of Buddhist works, which enjoyed the support of the court and officials in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, testifies to the popularity of Buddhism among the ruling elite during the Later Lê dynasty, when Confucianism was proclaimed the official ideology of the state.

Prémare’s Notitia Linguæ Sinicæ, 1728-1893: the Journey of a Language Textbook

This article retells the story of a Chinese language textbook, the Notitia linguæ sinicæ, written by a Catholic missionary in China for the use of Catholic missionaries to that country, and eventually printed by a Catholic mission press in China for the same purpose. It would have been a simple and short tale, if not for the fact that this many-faceted journey took one-hundred-and-sixty-five years to complete, involved crossing and re-crossing the two leading Christian traditions of Catholicism and Protestantism, took the work across great distances from Canton to Paris, London, Malacca, back to Canton and then to Hong Kong, and required the use of the Chinese language, both its higher form and the more day-to-day version, but also of Latin and English.

Making Rare Books Public: the Jiangsu Provincial Guoxue Library in the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937)

The history of the Jiangsu Provincial Guoxue Library (Jiangsu shengli guoxue tushuguan 江蘇省立國學圖書館) during the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937) demonstrates how China’s intellectual and material legacies—rare books in this case—were given new meaning and put into use in the form of a modern public library. Unpacking both the discursive and practical meanings of the ‘publicness’ of the library, this article demonstrates that during this transitional period, rare book collection became both a spiritual and material site where Chinese scholar-collectors and librarians inscribed their political ideals and advocacy, promoted research into China’s past, and inherited centuries-old practices from the literati-collectors of the premodern era.