Sources of Tibetan Tradition represents the efforts of a great many of our friends and colleagues in the United States and abroad, who, we hope, will find here a suitable reflection both of their many contributions and of the current state of the Tibetan Studies field.
Our first and foremost debt of gratitude is to Leonard van der Kuijp, our partner in initiating and planning Sources of Tibetan Tradition. Leonard collaborated fully in the early design of the work, suggesting many of the text selections that were eventually included. He would have certainly continued to be involved in its preparation, had not that bane of academic life—an all too heavy burden of administrative responsibility—precluded his subsequent participation. We have kept his vision of the project before us to the best of our collective ability throughout the course of its development.
We were fortunate to have enjoyed encouragement from those who generously shared with us both unpublished and previously published translations and editorial suggestions, comments, and responses to queries of various kinds. For these and other invaluable services, we thank Jean-Luc Achard, John Vincent Bellezza, Pema Bhum, Bryan J. Cuevas, Ronald Davidson, Brandon Dotson, Johan Elverskog, Jonathan Gold, Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., Lauran Hartley, Roger R. Jackson, Sarah Jacoby, Thubten Jinpa, Anne Caroline Klein, Yaroslav L. Komarovski, Ralf Kramer, Donald S. Lopez Jr., Dan Martin, Arsenio P. Martinez, Joseph McClellan, Fernand Meyer, Paul Nietupski, Andrew Quintman, Jann Ronis, Elliot Sperling, Tsuguhito Takeuchi, Dominique Townsend, Siddiq Wahid, and Koen Wellens. In addition, we are grateful to the publishers and other holders of publication rights, as mentioned in the list of credits, who graciously extended permission to us to reproduce selections from published work here.
In preparing the manuscript, we have been ably aided by several talented research assistants at our respective universities, who located rare publications, saw to transcribing and inputting text, and assembled necessary documentation. We are grateful for their careful efforts in this regard to Geoffrey Barstow, Benjamin Deitle, William McGrath, Natasha Mikles, and Lindsay Sekreve at the University of Virginia, and Megan Doherty at the University of Chicago.
The project as a whole benefited from the munificence of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, whose generosity has broadly contributed to the development of Tibetan Studies in recent years. Matthew Kapstein extends his gratitude to the Translation Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which supported some of the translations included herein under grant number RL-22065.
At the very inception of this project, it enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Professor William Theodore de Bary, founding editor of the Introduction to Asian Civilizations series. In its final stages, our work benefited from the reports of three anonymous referees commissioned by Columbia University Press. We thank them for the remarkable attention with which they reviewed a manuscript of this size, for their generous encouragement, and, above all, for their useful critical comments.
Jennifer Crewe, our commissioning editor at the Press, has graciously and patiently responded to our queries and gently prodded us forward through the long gestation this book has required. We also wish to express our gratitude to our excellent and hardworking copyeditor, Leslie Kriesel; to Cynthia Col for her careful work on the index; and to Karl Ryavec for his fine maps.