BIBLIOTHECA INDICA: A Collection of Oriental Works PUBLISHED BY THE ASIATIC SOCIETY OF BENGAL. New Series, No. 1426. MINOR TIBETAN TEXTS. I.—THE SONG OF THE EASTERN SNOW-MOUNTAIN. BY JOHAN VAN MANEN. CALCUTTA: PRINTED AT THE BAPTIST MISSION PRESS, AND PUBLISHED BY THE ASIATIC SOCIETY, 1, PARK STREET. 1919. PREFATORY NOTE. Lewin, in his ‘Manual of Tibetan,’ 1879, preface, states: “Tibet and its language are still comparatively unknown ... the familiar tongue of the people, their folk-lore, songs and ballads are all unknown.” Far from contradicting this saying, Jäschke, the greatest Tibetan scholar of his time, stated two years later, in 1881, in the preface to the third edition of his Tibetan Dictionary: “(To) the student who has for immediate object to learn how to read and write the Tibetan language ... existing dictionaries (are) almost if not quite useless.” Since Jäschke’s third edition, two new Tibetan dictionaries have appeared. Walsh in an article in the J.A.S.B., Vol. 72, Pt. 1, n. 2, 1903, reviewing the last one of these, the one by Sarat Chandra Das, says, p. 78: “Although the present Dictionary has fulfilled what it purposed to be, namely, a complete Dictionary of literary Tibetan, so far as our present sources of knowledge go, it does not fulfil the requirements of a standard dictionary of the entire language, and the standard dictionary of the modern and current Tibetan language has yet to be written.” Laufer, ‘Roman einer Tibetischen Königin,’ 1911, p. 27 et seq., says: “We have here to open a road through the jungles, unaided and by ourselves; we have to work through text after text and note down expressions and idioms as we meet them,” etc. Grünwedel in ‘Padmasambhava und Verwandtes,’ 1912, pp. 9–10, endorses Laufer’s remarks and adds about the difficulty of translating from Tibetan: “Ignorance regarding the subject-matter, mistakes and misunderstandings in the text itself, and, finally, the insufficiently explored idiomatic element of the language, of which the history is as yet poorly known, these are the main shoals.... Of all the dictionaries only Jäschke’s has really achieved something in the matter of idiom.”