The defining Berkeley archive of a Mongolian incarnate lama

Namgyal Dorje DaLama, Mongolian Lama (1899-1969). The UC Berkeley archive of the Venerable Namgyal Dorje DaLama, the Incarnate Lama of Cayan Obõ Süme.

€ 18.000,00

A defining archive of Mongolian Buddhist scholarship in exile. The UC Berkeley papers and teaching editions of the Venerable Namgyal Dorje DaLama, incarnate lama of Cayan Obõ Süme and last Abbot of the Chagan Obo Monastery in Shilin Gol, preserve the moment at which a major Inner Mongolian monastic lineage entered the academic world of the American West.

Identified in childhood as an incarnate lama, Namgyal Dorje DaLama was educated within one of the great monastic centres of Shilin Gol, whose five datsans reportedly housed more than 1,300 monks. Summoned to New York in February 1965 by Dilowa Khutukhtu during the latter's final illness, he was appointed in September of the same year to the Department of Oriental Languages at Berkeley, where his expertise in Mongolian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, ritual, and literature immediately assumed institutional importance.

The archive centres on the small Berkeley editions issued directly from his own calligraphic hand, reproduced in very limited runs and intended for advanced teaching and textual transmission rather than commercial circulation. Among them are Mu-thi-la'i phreng ba; Mes po'i zhal-lung (1966), Sa-Skya legs-bshad (1966), Mchod-rten chen-po bya-rung kha-shor gyi lo-rgyus Thos-pas grol-ba bzhugs-so (1967), Seven tales from the Mdzangs blun (1967), the Tibetan text of the Heart Sutra, Shes-rab-kyi pha-rol-tu phyin-paii snying-po (1967), and Mongyol-un tobci teüke - A Brief History of Mongolia (1969). These publications stand at the intersection of refugee monastic erudition and postwar American area studies. Reproduced from the present autograph calligraphy rather than from conventional typesetting, they preserve the graphic authority of the lama-editor while documenting Berkeley's early commitment to Tibetan and Mongolian studies at a formative historical moment.

The group also carries strong memorial significance: Namgyal Dorje DaLama died in Berkeley on 17 June 1969, shortly after beginning work on the cataloguing of the university library's Tibetan holdings; his calligraphic draft descriptions were remembered by contemporaries as a lasting monument to both his scholarship and his Buddhist piety.