The science of lexicography with its focus on etymology reaches back to ancient times; the history of Tibetan dictionaries is almost as old as the written language itself. About 1,200 years ago, the wish to translate the Buddhist scriptures in Sanskrit initiated the compilation of the first bilingual dictionary. lt provides Tibetan synonyms for Sanskrit terms and is written in Tibetan script. lt was compiled and used by monks who worked as scholars and translators. Throughout the following centuries, Tibetan dictionaries have been compiled, and, as will be shown, this happened for various reasons. As the Tibetan language is not yet fully explored, new dictionaries for Tibetan are still being worked on. One of these is under preparation in Munich; it will be the focus of the main part of this article. As the paper addresses a wider audience and not specifically scholars of Tibetan studies, l will situate Tibetan lexicography within a broader context, commencing with a brief introduction into the Tibetan script and language followed by a survey on the development of Tibetan lexicography and dictionaries. Then, the paper introduces the Wörterbuch der tibetischen Schriftsprache, an ongoing long-term project at the Bavarian Academy for Sciences and Humanities in Munich.

This paper addresses the questions that were left unanswered in my previously published works on the Mongolian translations of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā. It shows that the five earliest Mongolian translations of the sutra were based on the Tibetan version known as gzo sbyangs, suggesting that in the first half of the 17th century the gzo sbyangs version, which is a rarity today, dominated the transmission of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā in Mongolia and was later replaced by the widely spread phreng ba can version. Two of the early Mongolian translations have preserved a rare Tibetan colophon. Currently this colophon is known to have survived in a unique Tibetan manuscript kept at the Otani University, Japan. The colophon declares that the sutra was edited by several figures of the snga dar period, whose identities are under question.