György Kara (descr.): The Mongol and Manchu Manuscripts and Blockprints in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Foreword

л The present description started more than twelve years ago. I have carried the heavy bulk of my manuscript between Budapest, Hungary, and Bloomington, Indiana, several times. I began to type the text in Bloomington, 1988, later I worked with various word-processing programmes. (Slow work and changing facilities led to some unevenness and inconsistency in the presentation. For instance, at the beginning, I tried to mark all the orthographical vicissitudes of the texts in the transcriptions based on Ligeti'

s narrower system; while later I only gave a short note on the orthographical features of the texts.) As to the technical data, the sizes of the leaves/pages, their text frame, etc., they usually represent those of the first average and undamaged recto, which is not necessarily the first recto page of the text. The blockprint or manuscript frame (I use this word in the sense of the German Textspiegel) is measured along the outer edges. During my work on this description I enjoyed the help of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, its Oriental Collection, its head Dr. Éva Apor and her collegues. I am grateful to Dr.Alice Sárközi for her care of my text and to Attila Rákos for his help in wordprocessing. The errors are mine: erdemten merged örösiyen soyurqa. Here the units are arranged in the (mostly arbitrary) order in which they are kept in the Oriental Collection. Subject indices help thematical orientation. The title lists contain short and long variants and parallel titles in Mongolian, Tibetan, and Sanskrit, or, in Manchu and Chinese (in pinyin transcription), etc. Indices of the place names and personal names mentioned in the colophons, a list of the Chinese marginal marks, and another list of the Chinese titles in Chinese characters follow the descriptive part. György Kara VIII