Oldal 13 [13]
PROLEGOMENON
The present collection of essays is based mainly on the papers of the conference Mon¬
golian Buddhism: Past, Present, and Future organised by the Department of Mongo¬
lian and Inner Asian Studies and the Research Centre for Mongol Studies at Eötvös
Loránd University (ELTE)! (the detailed program of the conference cf. http://innerasia.
hu/event/mongolian-buddhism-conference-2015/). The original material became en¬
riched with scholarly contributions of researchers not participating the event, but being
interested to submit their studies in a comprehensive book about various aspects of
Mongolian Buddhism.
The present volume is a unique collection of essays from several aspects: on one
hand it offers a wide-ranging overview about the Mongolian Buddhism throughout
times, especially about the present situation, on the other hand the compilation and
systematisation of materials follows the traditional research trends of the Department
of Mongolian and Inner Asian Studies (originally Department of Inner Asian Studies
founded by Lajos Ligeti in 1942) namely the philological methodology and the em¬
phasis on fieldwork. According to these preliminaries the collection of essays contains
philological text analysis and numerous field research based studies. Equally important
is issuing articles based on archival documents that shed light on the history of Budd¬
hism and studies of Buddhism in various countries. We put also emphasis that besides
the leading scholars and researcher, “freshmen” of the discipline studying Mongolian
Buddhism could have a possibility to make their studies accessible for the international
academic audience. Researchers of following countries are represented with their stu¬
dies in the present volume: Austria, the Czech Republic, China, Great-Britain, Hungary,
Mongolia, Norway, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom and the USA.
The articles share three languages all of them important in studying Mongolian
Buddhism, English, Mongolian and Russian. We find it very important to include
articles in Mongolian as they contain the emic terminology the scholars work with. We
want to make accessible works of scholars from Mongolia and Inner Mongolia where
the discipline of Mongolian studies became the leading field of humanities.
! The following institutions also participated in the organising process and assisted the event: the Re¬
search Centre for the Humanities, Institute of Ethnology (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Budapest
Centre of Buddhist Studies (Eétvés Lorand University, Faculty of Humanities) and the Embassy of
Mongolia in Hungary. Here I would like to express my deepest gratitude for their invaluable support.
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