A History of Sanskrit Grammatical Literature in Tibet

The first comprehensive survey of the important corpus of Indic literature on Sanskrit grammar, extant in Tibetan translation in the Buddhist canon.

Core of the study is the description of the forty-seven Sanskrit grammatical treatises covering some two thousand folios in the canon. The contents of these texts and the historical information regarding their Tibetan translators are examined in detail. Further chapters are devoted to the grammatical analysis in an eighth-century Tibetan handbook for translators, and to data from Tibetan historiography.

The book offers the first systematic study of the extent and the historical development of the Tibetan expertise in Sanskrit grammar, a central scholastic discipline in Buddhism. It opens up a section of Tibetan literature essential to the understanding of the Indo-Tibetan indigenous grammatical traditions.