Changkya Rolpe Dorje's Source of Scholars (1741 to 1742)

Changkya Rolpe Dorje (1717 to 1786), imperial preceptor at the Qing court, compiled this dictionary of terms in 1741 to 1742 for the Mongolian translation of the Tanjur, the Tibetan Buddhist collection of commentaries. It fixed the technical vocabulary that later Tibetan and Mongolian writers used. The card lists a modern Serthar edition of 352 pages that prints the Tibetan only, scanned at BDRC. The bilingual Beijing block print of 1742 is the original form. The atlas does not hold the text of this edition: no copy was harvested into the corpus, so nothing from it was read for this guide.

How they knew

Compiled from others

Who “Tartar” means here

Not recorded, and the word is not expected in a dictionary of Buddhist and technical terms. The card names Tibetans, Mongols and the Qing court.

Why read it

It is a tool for reading the shared Tibetan and Mongolian vocabulary of the eighteenth century, alongside the trilingual name register.

Watch out

This edition prints only the Tibetan, so the Mongolian half of the original is missing. It is a reference work and holds no narrative about Tartars.