Roca

1937 · ref. 69051 — Leipzig: Verlag der Offizin Richard Hadl 1937. Rare offprint "separatum" from Artibus Asiae volume VII; 4to pp. 85 1; 16 mounted plates at the back a few illustrations in the text; first 2 leaves a bit toned else a very good sound copy in contemporary black wrappers printed paper label on upper cover. Rock 1884-1962 was "captivated by the ritual books he found in the possession of the Naxi religious specialists the 'dongba' while plant hunting in China's borderlands. Rock went on to devote the remaining years of his life to the translation of these books that contained such a treasure house of knowledge a corpus of literature that for Rock offered tantalising glimpses at the indigenous religion of pre-Buddhist Tibet. Rock a voracious autodidact appreciated an intellectual challenge: this was a script that by the time he first encountered it in the 1920s nobody had previously deciphered aside from some exploratory incomplete translations conducted via Chinese by French scholars and explorers. This vast corpus of ritual literature was essentially unexplored territory and this was where Rock liked to tread. Through his assiduous collecting and cataloguing and not without controversy he preserved thousands of these texts in collections now spread throughout the western world . While Rock's first published translations were no more than concise summaries of the stories he discovered within the Naxi manuscripts he later developed a more extensive anthropological style of translation. This meant recording in exacting detail the phonetic reading given by a dongba and then embarking upon a full written commentary. The first translation to use this method was published in 1937 as 'The birth and origin of Dto-mba Shilo the founder of Mo-so shamanism according to Mo-so manuscripts' a seminal work on Dobbaq-sheel'lo the mythical founding father of the dongba religion" see Poupard D.J. Introduction to: A Pictographic Naxi Origin Myth from Southwest China Leiden University Press. Only University of Hawaii in OCLC. Verlag der Offizin Richard Hadl unknown books