Thor bu - Curiosia Indo-Tibetica

Textual and visual odds and ends from India, Tibet, and around.

My Photo
Name:
Location: Kolozsvár/Cluj, Budapest, Oxford, ibi ubi

Friday, March 21, 2008

David Snellgrove interviewed

Most people (all three of them) who visit this blog must have read "Indo-Tibetan Buddhism", "Four Lamas of Dolpo" and the editio princeps of the "Hevajra Tantra". This is a fairly long interview with the author of those two (and many more) books. Snellgrove seems quite annoyed with many questions but I can fully endorse the insistence of the interviewers. So many small but interesting details are lost when these great men cease to write and speak. And Snellgrove's life was everything but boring. Perhaps not as adventurous as Conze's, whose biography "Memoirs of a Modern Gnostic" is now online (albeit illegally). This is truly one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. But that is another story and will be told at another time.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

thank Buddha the Conze books are floating around online, since they are out of print and otherwise available only as ridiculously expensive used copies.

6:54 am  
Blogger PDSz said...

and what did you think about the book?

2:05 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You presumably know of Snellgrove's Asian commitment: travels and studies in the Indian sub-continent and South-East Asia (Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2000). This work, while containing extremely dull passages, at times yields interesting details about the history of Tibetan studies at SOAS in particular and the UK in general.

9:06 pm  

Post a Comment

<< Home