gious life of Tibet occurred during the twentieth century.
These events drove some Tibetans into a Western-oriented
study of their own religion, brought Western scholars into
close contact with learned lamas, and drew scholarly atten-
tion to a very early period of Bon and Buddhism in Tibet,
while almost simultaneously revealing contemporary prac-
tices with a precision and on a scale previously impossible for
various political or geographical reasons.
The first event was the discovery in 1905 of Tibetan
texts from the eighth to eleventh centuries in a cave along
the Silk Road at Dunhuang, China. For the next several
years, British, French, Russian, and Japanese scholars were
able to study manuscript materials that were much older
than those previously known and that were contemporary to
the events they described. These materials revolutionized the
study of Bon and Buddhism in Tibet, as well as the study
of the religious currents flowing through the Tibetan empire
from the East and the West. The development of the study
of the Dunhuang manuscripts has been of paramount im-
portance in the understanding of Tibetan religions, which
for decades had been studied only from a Buddhist perspec-
tive, and historically only from a relatively late perspective.
Following the studies of Gustave Charles Toussaint and
Marcelle Lalou in Paris, one of the most innovative books
in this field was Études Tibétaines dédiées à la mémoire de
Marcelle Lalou (1971), which contained articles by Ariane
Macdonald, Rolf A. Stein, and others, and which presented
a truly new perspective on the religions of Tibet. The work
begun with this volume was later completed by the publica-
tion of selections of the Pelliot Choix de documents tibétains
conservés à la bibliothèque nationale (1978–2001) by Ariane
Macdonald, Yoshiro Imaeda, and T. Takeuchi.
The second event was the Chinese invasion of Tibet in
the 1950s. Numerous lamas took up residence thereafter in
Nepal, northern India, Europe, the United States, and else-
where. These exiles took some of their vast literature and
physical culture with them, and made it accessible to West-
ern scholars. In the late 1980s, Tibetans in China also started
to publish a great number of texts through state-owned pub-
lishing houses, and later privately. Some of these texts had
been previously unknown to many scholars, and they added
to the corpus of materials already available.
A third important development occurred in the early
1980s with the relative opening of Tibetan areas, which,
along with inexpensive air travel, allowed many researchers
to travel and do fieldwork in Tibet. A fourth major develop-
ment was the advent of the Internet and the digitalization
of many Tibetan texts beginning at the end of the twentieth
century.
Since the mid-1980s, therefore, there has been no
dearth of publications about the religion of Tibet. There has
been, however, a shift from a purely philological approach
to a more interdisciplinary approach that incorporates histo-
ry, anthropology, and even art history (numerous exhibitions
of Tibetan art have been accompanied by expert catalogues).
This shift was certainly the result of scholars being able to
travel to Tibet and adjacent areas, and it was also a reflection
of the monastic background of some writers. Moreover, the
role of women in Tibetan Buddhism, which was all but ig-
nored in earlier writings, became prominent, along with the
study of the Bon tradition and Tibetan popular religion, in-
cluding local cults that are not necessarily Buddhist or have
become “buddhicized.” These trends in scholarship have
profoundly transformed the study of Tibetan religions.
One of the first major contributions to the advancement
of the field was the United States Library of Congress project
initiated in the 1970s in New Delhi by Gene E. Smith. This
program encouraged Tibetans to publish previously un-
known texts and disseminate them to academic institutions
in the West. Smith added further to the study of the field
by establishing the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center,
which promotes research and scholarship in Tibetan Bud-
dhism through digital text and image preservation. Similar
projects include the Tsadra Foundation, sponsored by the
Trace Foundation, which publishes Tibetan texts and trans-
lations. The Trace Foundation has also established the online
Latse Contemporary Tibetan Cultural Library, which offers
texts and other research materials and sponsors programs for
people interested in Tibetan culture. The Tibetan and Hi-
malayan Digital Library, sponsored by the University of Vir-
ginia, publishes multilingual and multimedia texts and re-
sources, as well as creative works concerned with the culture
and history of Tibet and the Himalayas. Digital versions of
the Dunhuang Tibetan documents are available at Old Ti-
betan Documents Online, a website established by a group
of Japanese scholars. Other useful websites include Digital
Himalaya, sponsored by Department of Social Anthropology
at Cambridge University and the Anthropology Department
at Cornell University, and Tibet Visual History Online,
sponsored by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Such web-
sites are popular with researchers because they include old
and previously unavailable footage and photographs, and
they constitute a good base for religious studies from an an-
thropological approach. In 2002, the Tibetology team of the
French National Center for Scientific Research inaugurated
the first digital academic journal on Tibetan studies: Revue
d’Etudes Tibétaines. In addition, the major Tibetan religious
traditions and lamas have their own websites, where one can
find texts, teachings, and photos, as well as polemical writ-
ings. In 2003, in Oxford, Tibetologists from all over the
world who had gathered for the International Association of
Tibetan Studies seminar decided to launch the digital Journal
of the International Association of Tibetan Studies (JIATS).
The use of the Internet is truly a revolution for a field
as previously obscure as the study of Tibetan religions; the
Internet allows information to flow even to remote areas of
the Tibetan world. The great Western pioneer student of
Tibet’s religious culture was the Hungarian traveler Alexan-
der Csoma de Körös (c. 1784–1842), some of whose work
is still valuable, while that of many of his near-9188 TIBETAN RELIGIONS: HISTORY OF STUDY