The Athenaeum

The Library has comprehensive collection of books and rare Tibetan and Himalayan manuscripts, of particular interest are the collection of publications on the Dun Huang documents, one of the earliest sources on numerous subjects on Central Asian culture including history, literature, religion, law, astrology and medicine. The original manuscripts date around the 6th to 12th century and discovered in there earlier part of the 20th century at various caves on and near the famed silk road of the central Asia. Other important collections are the multilingual Buddhist Kagyur and Tengyur , the Bon Kagyur, many commentaries of great masters of the four major sects of Tibetan Buddhism, and the personal collection and journals of the well-known western scholar and pioneer of Buddhism, Lama Anagrika Govinda. Songtsen Library has recently installed over 6000 digitized format Buddhist texts from the Tibetan Buddhist resource Center of New York. Similarly a master collection of archival quality CD-Rs from the orient foundation with over 13000 hours of video and oral commentary of the great Buddhist masters of the past 15 years will be available. Both these recent developments and the ongoing expansion of our online database further our mission to make these important works more accessible to the public.