"No one knows the full range of Tibetan literature better than Gene Smith. His numerous introductions to Tibetan works are so valuable as to be priceless."—Prof. Jeffrey Hopkins, author of Cultivating Compassion: A Buddhist Perspective

For three decades, E. Gene Smith ran the Library of Congress's Tibetan Text Publication Project of the United States Public Law 480 (PL480)—an effort to salvage and reprint the Tibetan literature that had been collected by the exile community or by members of the Bhotia communities of Sikkim, Bhutan, India, and Nepal.

Smith wrote prefaces to these reprinted books to help clarify and contextualize the particular Tibetan texts: the prefaces served as rough orientations to a poorly understood body of foreign literature. Originally produced in print quantities of 20, these prefaces quickly became legendary, and soon photocopied collections were handed from scholar to scholar, achieving an almost cult status.

These essays are collected here for the first time. The impact of Smith's research on the academic study of Tibetan literature has been tremendous, both for his remarkable ability to synthesize diverse materials into coherent accounts of Tibetan literature, history, and religious thought, and for the exemplary critical scholarship he brought to this field.

E. Gene Smith, Author

After a thirty-year overseas career in the Library of Congress, E. GENE SMITH became Executive Director of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC)—the world's most comprehensive collection of Tibetan literature, which is being scanned and distributed online at tbrc.org. He lives in New York City.

Jeffrey Hopkins, Foreword

Jeffrey Hopkins is Professor of Tibetan Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia where he has taught Tibetan Studies and Tibetan language since 1973. He received a B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1963, trained for five years at the Lamaist Buddhist Monastery of America (now the Tibetan Buddhist Learning Center) in New Jersey, and received a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Wisconsin in 1973. From 1979 to 1989 he served as His Holiness the Dalai Lama's chief interpreter into English on lecture tours in the U.S., Canada, Southeast Asia, Great Britain, and Switzerland. He has published seventeen articles and more than twenty-five books, including Meditation on Emptiness. At the University of Virginia he founded programs in Buddhist Studies and Tibetan Studies and served as Director of the Center for South Asian Studies for twelve years.