Beijing Edition of Ganjur from the Tibetan Collection of the Institute for Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies of the Siberian Branch of the RAS

Introduction. The article is devoted to the study of the Beijing edition of Ganjur from the collection of the Tibetan fund of the Institute for Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies of the Siberian Branch of the RAS. The relevance of the study is concerned with the need to study and record Buddhist canonical collections of different editions stored in various Russian funds, which will create favorable conditions for further comparative studies. As the quintessence of Buddhist teaching, the Buddhist canon is of great importance in religious, source studies and archaeographic research. The purpose of the work is to introduce into scientific circulation the collection of Ganjur of the Beijing edition kept in the Tibetan fund of the Institute for Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies of the Siberian Branch of the RAS as well as to review structural analysis and its printing features. Methods. The authors, believing that written monuments of Buddhism are the indicator and the result of not only intellectual (also physical in this case) labor, but also considering that its creation and functioning formed the pro-Buddhist zeitgeist of that era, used the methods of “cognitive history”. Beijing editions of Ganjur occupy a special place among other canonical editions. It was from 1410 — the time of creation of the first xylographic edition of the Ganjur — that the history of interconnected Beijing editions began, patronized by the emperors themselves and forming a favorable climate for the development of Buddhism in the regions. Conclusions. The introduction of this edition into scientific circulation enriches the domestic bibliographic base of studies of Buddhist canonical investigations. The preliminary work with the collection confirms the importance of the archaeographic representation of this edition with the successive demonstration of the historical and socio-cultural significance of the Beijing Ganjur from the Institute for Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies of the Siberian Branch of the RAS. The work with the collection revealed certain problems in establishing the history of this complex source.

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