Pis'mennye pamiatniki Vostoka

The paper presents a commented translation of the fragment “Jñāna-nirdeśa” (“The doctrine of knowledge”) from the seventh part of the exegetic compendium Abhidharmakośabhāîya ascribed to the eminent medieval Buddhist thinker Vasubandhu (4th–5th centuries AD). The fragment can be used as a historical source for the study of evolution of the image of the Buddha in post-Canonical treatises where the real Śakyamuni was invested with the attributes of a transcendental object of reli­gious cult. The text explicates the conceptual differences between the great compassion (ma­hākāru¹ā), treated as the Buddha’s attribute, and compassion (kāru¹ā) as a characteristic trait of enlightened ascetics (śravakas and pratyekabuddhas) and explains the postulate of identity of all buddhas’ perfections (the perfection of religious merits and knowledge, the perfection of the Dharmic body, the perfection of serving all sentient beings). This is the first translation based on the Sanskrit edition by P. Pradhan (Pradhan 1967: 414–416).

The authors of the article studied a copy of the hagiographical Tadhkira-yi Khwāja Quðb ad-dīn ‘Irāqī housed at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, RAS, St. Petersburg. On the basis of the data from this source, the relationships between the Sufis of Naqshbandiya in Central Asia and some aspects of the tradition of knowledge inheritance are considered. Emphasis is placed on the Quðb al-‘alām degree of the Sufis, which is revealed in the Tadhkira. The value of this copy also lies in the fact that it contains information on the tradition of Uvaysiya, popular in Eastern Turkestan.

The structure of the proposed publication: The introductory part, were the author examines the necessity of the unification of Arab-Islamic terminology in Russian Academic Islamic studies as a step on the way to the proper understanding and translation of Arab-Islamic lexicon and as a measure contributing to the improvement of professional knowledge of Islam. Two subject-matter parts contain a database of Arab-Islamic vocabulary, prepared on the basis of the contents of original Arab-Islamic sources and presented in the form of two tables, in which the selected terminology is presented in Arabic script, Cyrillic alphabet and Latin transliteration, with an appen­ded Russian translation.

There are several collections of Chinese popular woodblock prints nianhua in the fund of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences (the Kunstkam­era) acquired from different collectors. The paper addresses the so-called “Okulich” collection (MAE No. 3676) consisting of 250 original titles, most of which possess undoubted artistic value. According to the dated sheets, the prints were produced in the last years of the 19th century, and no later than 1904. We only know that, in 1928, a man named Okulich donated these prints to the Kunstkamera. Two groups of paintings from this collection are discussed in more detail: a series of prints that represent illustrations for the main Chinese textbook The Thousand Character Essay (Qian zi wen), and those named xiaojiaochang nianhua printed in Shanghai in the early 20th century. Their scrutiny allows us to conclude that the collector was both serious and skillful in selecting sheets for this collec­tion: apart from being fluent in Chinese, he was a connoisseur of Chinese traditional culture and lived in China for a long time. We discovered a large family with surname Okulich who lived in China in the first half of the last century, and contacted a member of this family, but she was unable to help us with identifying the potential collector.

The ground for the Babi Faith (Babism) as an independent religious system was laid by Shaikhism, an esoteric Shi’ih school. A great role in this process was played by one of the prominent Shaykhi theologists and religious thinkers Sayid Kazim Rashti. He developed certain concepts which, apart from being revolutionary for Islam, paved the way for Babism to some extent, while many of his disciples made up the ranks of the first Babis. The article considers three sources which reveal the crucial factors of this process from the theological standpoint as well as focuses on the transformation of the mindset of some of Sayid Kazim’s prominent disciples into the Babi worldview.

Letters by Th.I. Stcherbatsky (1866–1941) to his teacher I.P. Minaev (1840–1890) were addressed to Pou resort, France and dated January–March 1890. The preface to the publication analyzes important aspects: the university life and circumstances, scientific plans of the young Stcherbartsky. It expounds, for the first time, his attitude to the system of local self-government in rural regions (zemstvo). This publication explains the early period of Th. Stcherbatsky’s biography and is thus an important contribution to historical studies of the period. Letters by Th. Stcherbatsky are housed at the personal archive of I.P. Minaev at the Archives of the Orientalists at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, RAS. They are being published for the first time.

Two meetings of the conference were held during the period under review.

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