HTIB00017U Reading a Stages of the doctrine (bstan rim) text and Colloquial Tibetan

Reading a Stages of the doctrine (bstan rim) text: The Essence of the Mahāyāna-doctrine (theg chen bstan pa'i snying po)

From the time of the earliest codifications of what is traditionally believed to be the direct words of the Buddha, its followers had to deal with very big corpora of text. The breadth and profundity called for comprehensive summaries of the Buddhist doctrine. In how far already in India certain treatises were composed by the Buddha's followers with this outlook is still subject to research, but in Tibet a wealth of texts was produced with exactly that purpose of comprehensively summarising and gradually engaging into the vast and profound Buddhist doctrine.

In the course we shall initially discuss the basic divisions of Buddhist literature into its canonical and commentarial aspects that form the background of the Tibetan Stages of the doctrine (bstan rim) literature. We will then read excerpts from The Essence of the Mahāyāna-doctrine (theg chen bstan pa'i snying po) as a specimen of that Tibetan literary genre.

Colloquial Tibetan

This course builds upon previous Tibetan language foundation course. The aim is to develop basic skills in colloquial Tibetan language for students on intermediate level, beginning with progressive instructions into Tibetan language based different kinds of course material with additional voice recordings of exercises and readings, supplemented with language training games, drills and repetition.