Aspects of Mongolian Buddhism I.

The present volume is a unique collection of essays from several aspects: on one hand it offers a wide-ranging overview about the Mongolian Buddhism throughout times, especially about the present situation, on the other hand the compilation and systematisation of materials follows the traditional research trends of the Department Mongolian and Inner Asian Studies (originally Department of Inner Asian Studies founded by Lajos Ligeti in 1942) the philological methodology and the emphasis on field work. According to these preliminaries the collection of essays contains philological texts analysis and numerous field research based studies. Equally important is issuing articles based on archival documents that shed light on the history of Buddhism and studies of Buddhism in various countries. The articles share three languages all of them important in studying Mongolian Buddhism, English, Mongolian and Russian. We find it very important to include articles in Mongolian as these articles contain the emic terminology the scholars work with. We want to make accessible woks of scholars form Mongolia and Inner Mongolia where the discipline of Mongolian studies became the leading field of humanities