Root Text
Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia is now 14 years old
Our Encyclopedia recently received a wonderful opportunity for a major renewal on its 14th birthday . After many years of growing our Encyclopedia had become bit slow and sometimes even decided not to answer when people knocked on the door.
A very big thank you and blessings to Dmytro Rudiy (rudiy.nl) for his great work in upgrading the server, website and all of the infrastructure and helping make TBE fast and reliable again for everyone! 🙏🙏🙏
We kindly ask our readers to help us cover the cost of this important upgrade and also help with the ongoing costs of keeping the Encyclopedia alive and freely available.
or card
Every little donation helps and every one is deeply appreciated. 🙏🙏🙏
OM AH HUM VAJRA GURU PADMA SIDDHI HUM 🙏🙏🙏
May blessings shower down on all of yous 🙏🙏🙏
A root text is a poem meant to be memorized and to be supplemented by a written or oral commentary.
It is a "word commentary," one that paraphrases and expands the root text, which because of its brevity can be rather like a telegram.
Root-text or core-text, sometimes in verse and sometimes in prose, surrounded by concentric layers of prose commentary , and sub-commentary.
The roottext is usually relatively short and is essentially a mnemotechnical aid for the student , to be learned by heart as a first step in coming to grips with a particular corpus: the layers of commentary then provide exegesis and systematization, as well as extended discussion of controversial questions.
All four schools of Tibetan Buddhism generally follow a similar curriculum, using the same Indian root texts and commentaries.