ELTE Institute of East Asian Studies
1088 Budapest Múzeum krt. 4/F
411-6550
tavolkeletint@btk.elte.hu
A Buddhizmus-kutatás Központja
The Centre’s webpage:
tavolkeletiintezet.elte.hu/buddhistcentre
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Leadership:
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Address: 1088 Budapest, Múzeum krt. 4/B, 124. Email: bcbs@btk.elte.hu |
In 2012 the Senate of the ELTE accepted the proposal of the Far-East Institute to establish the Budapest Centre for Buddhist Studies.
The aim of the establishment of the Centre was to create an institution for supporting and coordinating the diverse ongoing researches and education of Buddhism at the University, for organizing national and international conferences, and to help the international cooperation on the field of Buddhist studies.
Hungarian scholars were involved in the studies of Buddhism from its early days, making pioneering work in many respects. Alexander Csoma de Kőrös (1784-1842) who travelled across Asia to find the ancestral homeland of the Hungarian people, spent many years in Buddhist monasteries of Western Tibet (Ladakh, Zangskar) where learned Tibetan and became acquainted with Tibetan literature. Due to his persistent work he offered to the world the first description of a Buddhist canon (the Tibetan Bka’ ‘gyur and the Bstan ‘gyur), made translations of Buddhist and Tibetan classics, and published a number of articles on Tibet. These publications, together with his main works, the Tibetan Grammar, the Tibetan-English Dictionary and the English translation of the Mahāvyutpatti, the Sanskrit-Tibetan Buddhist terminological dictionary, makes him the founder of both Tibetology and western Buddhology.
Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943), the Hungarian-British explorer and archeologist, excavated the ruins of ancient city states along the Central Asian part of the Silk Road, the one-time centers of flourishing Buddhism. With the discovery of the walled-up library-cave at Dunhuang he opened a source for Buddhist texts that are still making subject of ongoing Buddhological researches.
At the ELTE University the research and studies of Buddhism were initiated in the 1940’s by Louis (Lajos) Ligeti (1902-1987), a disciple of Paul Pelliot, the famous French orientalist, who after returning from Paris, founded the Inner Asian Department and gave Mongolian and Tibetan lectures.
During his research trip in China and Inner-Mongolia in 1928-30, Ligeti spent much time in Mongolian Buddhist monasteries, collected Buddhist books, and prepared a description of the printed Mongolian Kanjur, the first part of the Mongolian Buddhist canon (he published it in 1942-44). His pupil, George (György) Kara, continued his master’s work, editing and translating many Buddhist works, including a Hungarian translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In the Department of Chinese Studies, Pál Miklós held regularly lectures on Chinese Buddhism, and Chinese Buddhist Art in the 1980’s.
Currently, many members of the Far-East Institute, the Indology and Philosophy Department of the University do research on different fields of Buddhism. This research covers almost all the lands on which Buddhism has been flourished during its long and successful history across Asia (India, the Central Asian part of the Silk Road, China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, and Mongolia), and a variety of academic fields, like Philology, Linguistics, Religious Studies, Philosophy, History, and Anthropology. Buddhist studies have already been offered as a two year-long program (the Buddhist Program) in the former, single-cycle education system at the University. This program has been continued as the Buddhist Disciplinary Minor in the new three-cycle (Bolognese) educational system. Due to the popularity of the Buddhist Studies (at present there are more than twenty students enrolled in the course) we started to work out an upgrade of the Minor into an English language Buddhist MA program that could attract foreign students as well.
Our Centre is in cooperation with the Japanese Otani University and, thanks to the financial help of the Komatsu Chiko Foundation, they send us every year a guest professor to give intensive lectures on Japanese Buddhism. Since 2013 we are having the generous support of the American Khyentse Foundation that enabled us to develop the Budapest Centre for Buddhist Studies in a number of ways.