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PROLEGOMENON The present collection of essays is based mainly on the papers of the conference Mongolian Buddhism: Past, Present, and Future organised by the Department of Mongolian 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 enriched 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 emphasis 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 Buddhism 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 studies 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 Research 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. 11
