Descripción

Contents: 1. Historical. 2. Doctrinal. 3. Monastic. 4. Buildings. 5. Mythology and Gods. 6. Ritual and sorcery. 7. Festivals and plays. 8. Popular Lamaism. Appendices. Index. "The special characteristics of the book are its detailed accounts of the external facts and curious symbolisms of Buddhism, and its analyses of the internal movements leading to Lamaism and its sects and cults. It provides material culled from hoary Tibetan tradition and explained by Lamas for elucidating many obscure parts in primitive Indian Buddhism and its later symbolism. Thus a clue is supplied to several dispute doctrinal points of fundamental importance, as for example the formula of the casual nexus. "With this view the nabulous Tibetan "history" so called of the earlier periods has been somewhat critically examined in the light afforded by some scholarly Lamas and contemporary history and all fictitious chronicles, hitherto treated usually as historical and rejected as authoritative for events which happened a thousand years before they were written and for a time when writing was admittedly unknown in Tibet." 598 pp