The Tibetan Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom in 100,000 VersesThe Dalai Lama received the The Congressional Gold Medal today. The award is our nation’s highest civilian honor and was given to the Dalai Lama in recognition of his advocacy for religious harmony, nonviolence and human rights throughout the world.
The Dalai Lama also met with President Bush though you won’t see any pictures of this event because the Chinese are pissed off and the Bush administration agreed not to release any pictures of the meeting. The Bush Administration also chose not to release a formal statement on the meeting.
Luckily the Library of Congress hasn’t caved in to the pressure and is honoring the Dalai Lama’s visit with a 3 day exhibition titled Celebrating Tibet. The exhibit will feature 40 rare and highly decorative Tibetan books from the 17th through 19th centuries and other related materials from the LOC’s extensive Asian collection.
About the Tibetan Collection:
The Tibetan collection of the Library of Congress began in 1901 with a presentation of 57 xylographs and eight manuscripts acquired by William Woodville Rockhill, U.S. Minister to China, during his travels in Mongolia and Tibet from 1888 to 1892. Between 1901 and 1928 approximately 920 original xylographs and manuscripts were acquired for the Library primarily by Rockhill, Berthold Laufer, and Joseph Rock. Currently, the collection is one of the largest in the West, consisting of approximately 9,000 volumes, made up of hundreds of individual titles.
The Library’s Tibetan collection is representative of the entire corpus of Tibetan literature from the 8th century to the present: Buddhist and Bon-po philosophical texts and their commentaries, history, biography, traditional medicine, astrology, iconography, musical notations, the collected works of over 200 major Tibetan authors, bibliographies, traditional grammars and linguistic sciences, modern science, social sciences and modern literature. Among the Library’s holdings are several rare xylograph redactions of the Buddhist canonical literature, Kanjur and Tanjur, as well as a complete set of the Bon-po Kanjur and Tanjur. The Derge Kanjur was acquired for the Library by William Rockhill in 1901, and the Narthang Tanjur was acquired by Berthold Laufer in 1926. The complete Coni redaction in 317 volumes acquired by Joseph Rock in 1928 is one of only a few known to exist today.
Tibetan Books Starting the Journey to the Library of Congress, 1926.Tibetan Studies collection overview
The celebration on the West Lawn