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CZECHOSLOVAK ACADEMIC STUDY OF BUDDHISM IN THE 1950s AND 1960s: FIELD RESEARCH IN ASIA Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences; later on, he was appointed scientific secretary. At his new workplace in Prague he began his close professional collaboration with Josef Vanië (January 6, 1927 — February 12, 2009) and Vladimir Sis (July 7, 1925 — September 7, 2001), both of whom were Czechoslovak filmmakers and photographers, and both of whom had also travelled in China and Tibet from 1953 to 1955. They had amassed during this time a large amount of photographic and filmic material, which they put to good use after their return. Their documentary film The Road Leads to Tibet [Cesta vede do Tibetu] won an honorable mention at the film festival in Venice in 1956. Working with Jisl, in 1958 they published the first Czechoslovak monograph (with German, English, and French texts) about Tibetan art based upon Vanis’s and Sis’s photographs from China and Tibet.' Lumir Jisl had already worked for the ‘collection of Lamaist art’ at the Naprstek Museum, as prior to his arrival in Prague, no one else was capable of working with the Tibetan and Mongolian artefacts on a professional and scientific level. Of enormous help to him in gaining knowledge about Asia was the founder of Czechoslovak Mongolian studies, Pavel Poucha: Poucha was someone to whom Jis! turned to not only for help in linguistic matters. Poucha’s trip to Mongolia in 1955 was in fact the first research trip of a Czechoslovak Mongolist to this country and the effort immediately bore its fruit: in cooperation with Byambiin Rinchen'* (1905-1979) — the pre-eminent Mongolian linguist, ethnographer and scholar of religions — as well as with other colleagues at the Scientific Committee of the Mongolian People’s Republic (the Academy of Science), an international agreement was prepared and later signed which was to form the basis of Jisl’s Asian travels, as well that of the international archaeological expeditions. It is certainly worth noting that both Poucha and Jisl were resident in Peking for a lengthy period in 1957, from where — completely independent of each other — they undertook both shorter and longer ‘reconnaissance’ trips through China, particularly in search of Buddhist monuments located near the country’s borders. This was by no means an ordinary affair: this kind of sojourn, namely with the stated goal of travelling to map out the contemporary situation concerning archaeological sites, as well as monuments of religious character, was at the time granted only to scientific experts from the ‘friendly’ nations of the so-called camp of countries building a socialist future. The same criteria applied to Mongolian-Czechoslovak relations, with the one difference being that the possibility of travel to the Chinese People’s Republic ended with the cessation of relations between Moscow and Beijing at the beginning of the 1960s. This makes Jisl’s written and photographic documentary work, as yet unpublished, from his six-month stay in China in 1957-1958, all the more rare and valuable. 'S See Jisl, Lumir — Sis, Vladimir — Vani8, Josef: Tibetische Kunst. Artia Praha 1958, 48 pp. + 112 ill., published in French as L’art tibetain and in English as Tibetan Art. 16 Poucha, Pavel: Life and Work of Byambiin Rinchen. Archiv orientalni Vol. 54 (1986), pp. 168-179; see also Atwood, Christopher: Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire. Fact on File, New York 2004, pp. 476-477. 411
