Three Years in Tibet- Bibliotheca Himalayica

Preface I was lately reading the Holy Text of the Saddharina Pundarika (the Aphorisms of the White Lotus of the Wonderful or True Law) in a Samskrt manuscript under a Bodhi-tree near Mrga-Dava (Saranath), Benares. Here are Blessed Lord Buddha Shaky-Muni taught His Holy Pharma just after the accomplishment of His Buddha hood at Buddhagaya. Whilst doing so, I was reminded of the time, eighteen years ago, when I had read the same text in Chinese at a great Monastery named Ohbakusang at Kyoto in Japan, a reading which determined me to undertake a visit to Tibet.

It was in March, 1891, that I gave up the Rectorship of the Monastery of Gohyakurakan in Tokyo, and left for Kyoto, where I remained living as a hermit for about three years, totally absorbed in the study of a large collection of Buddhist books in the Chinese language. My object in doing so was to fulfil a long-felt desire to translate the texts into Japanese in an easy style from the difficult and unintelligible Chinese.

But I afterwards found that it was not a wise thing to rely upon the Chinese texts alone, without comparing them with Tibetan translations as well as with the original Samskrt texts which are contained in Mahayana Buddhism. The Buddhist Samskṛt texts were to be found in Tibet and Nepal. Of course, many of them had been discovered by European Orientalists in Nepal and a few in other parts of India and Japan. But those texts had not yet been found which included the most important manu scripts of which Buddhist scholars were in great want.

Introduction Rarely had a more eccentric character attempted and succeded in visiting Lhasa in the 19th century than the Japanese Zen monk Kawaguchi Ekai (1866-1945), except perhaps the Englishman Thomas Manning who made it to Lhasa in 1811. Manning's remarkable account was reprinted in Bibliotheca Himalayica in 1971, and that of Kawaguchi in 1979,2 Kawaguchi was a type not easily classified, either by traditional Japanese or European standards of this or the past century. He comes across as a stern and rigid observer at times, then as careless and unattentive at other times. He was impractical and clumsy yet he muddled through the most impossible situations with life and limb intact. He was scholarly and perceptive, fond of children and the company of learned men, yet he could spend long periods in isolation or come to physical blows with his equally learned discussion partner. We should be grateful to Scott Berry, who in 1990 published a highly readable biograpy of this remarkable man, appropriately entitled A Stranger in Tibet.

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