Stcherbatsky studied in the famous Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum (graduating in 1884), and later in the Historico-Philological Faculty of Saint Petersburg University (graduating in 1889), where Ivan Minayeff and Serge Oldenburg were his teachers. Subsequently, sent abroad, he studied Indian poetry with Georg Bühler in Vienna, and Buddhist philosophy with Hermann Jacobi in Bonn. In 1897, he and Oldenburg inaugurated Bibliotheca Buddhica, a library of rare Buddhist texts.
Returning from a trip to India and Mongolia, in 1903 Stcherbatsky published (in Russian) the first volume of Theory of Knowledge and Logic of the Doctrine of Later Buddhists ( 2 vols., St. Petersburg, 1903-1909 ). In 1928 he established the Institute of Buddhist Culture in Leningrad. His The Conception of Buddhist Nirvana (Leningrad, 1927), written in English, caused a sensation in the West. He followed suit with his main work in English, Buddhist Logic (2 vols., 1930–32), which has exerted an immense influence on Buddhology.
Although Stcherbatsky remained less well known in his own country, his extraordinary fluency in Sanskrit and Tibetan languages won him the admiration of Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore. According to Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, "Stcherbatsky did help us – the Indians – to discover our own past and to restore the right perspective of our own philosophical heritage." The Encyclopædia Britannica (2004 edition) acclaimed Stcherbatsky as "the foremost Western authority on Buddhist philosophy". (Accessed Sept 25, 2020)
Library Items
His work has not failed to attract the attention of European scholarship. Wassilieff quotes it in the first volume of his Buddhism, Sarat Candra Das has translated some excerpts out of it. I myself have published a translation in French, in the Muséon 1905 ("Notes de littéature buoddhique. La littérature Yogācāra d'après Bou-ston"),
ston"), of the part devoted to the litterature of the Yogācāra school, and, in English, of the part dealing with the Abhidharma Iitterature of the Sarvāstivādins, included in Prof. Takakusu's work on the Abhidharma Iitterature of the Sarvāstivādins. In the years 1927 and 1928 I have interpreted the work to my pupil E. E. Obermiller making it the subject of our seminary study. He then has made an English translation which was revised by me and is now published, thanks to the kind attention accorded to it by the Heidelberg Society for the Investigation of Buddhist Lore and by its president Professor M. Walleser.
The translation of the first part, now published, was not an easy task, since it consists predominantly of quotations, many of them having the form of mnemonic verse (kārikā's). They had to be identified and their commentaries consulted. With very few exceptions all has been found out by E. E. Obermiller in the Tanjur works. The high merit of this self-denying, absorbing and difficult work will, I have no doubt, be fully appreciated by fellow scholars who have a personal experience of that kind of work.
Budon Rinpoche was a native of Central Tibet. He lived in the years 1290–1364. He consequently belongs to the old school of Tibetan learning, the school which preceded the now dominant Gelugpa sect (the yellow-caps) founded by Tsoṅkhapa. Besides the History he has written many other works. A full block-print edition of all his works in 15 volumes has recently appeared in Lhasa. No copy of it has as yet reached Leningrad. Among his works there is one on logic, Tshad-ma-rnam-ṅes-pai-bsdus-don = Pramāṇa-viniçcaya-piṇḍārtha, with his own commentary. A block-print containing his biography (rnam-thar) is in my possession. It will be analyzed by E. E. Obermiller in the Introduction also dealing with the sources of Tibetan historiography, which will be attached to the translation of the whole work. The Translation is made from the text of the old block-print edition, a copy of which is found in the Asiatic Museum of the Academy of Sciences of the U. S. S. R. (Th. Stcherbatsky, introduction, 3–4)
Notes
- These translations are in need of revision, since there are considerable mistakes in which both translations always agree.
- Bod-Chos-ḥbyuṅ.
