བོད་ཀྱི་རྩོམ་རིགས། / bod kyi rtsom rigs

There are already some published works out there that deal with Tibetan literary genre (e.g. José Ignacio Cabezón and Roger R. Jackson,  Tibetan Literature: Studies in Genre. Ithaca, Snow Lion, 1996) but just because we have a volume dedicated to a topic does not necessarily mean that the topic has been dealt systematically and comprehensively. Actually it appears that we have barely scratched the surface of the topic. We also find some autochthonous Tibetan works dealing with Tibetan literary genre (e.g. Klu-tshang rDo-rje-rin-chen, Bod kyi rtsom rigs rnam bzhag. Bejing: Mi-rigs-dpe-skrun-khang, 2004) but the approach, purpose, and scope of such enterprises seem different. This blog intends to collect, document, and explain different Tibetan terms that express various Tibetan literary genres and subgenres. Tibetan sources would often mention a certain term that could refer to a physical book as well as to a literary genre. Those terms that deal with physical books are being documented and discussed in the Khyentse Center’s gSung-rten project. Because I could not include terms dealing with Tibetan literary genres and subgenres in the gSung-rten database, I thought it may not be a bad idea to have a personal blog dedicated to the collection, documentation, and explanation of Tibetan terms that refer to certain Tibetan literary genres or subgenres. As indicated above, the Tibetan term for “Tibetan literary genre” may be bod kyi rtsom rigs. But this seems to be certainly a neologism. In Tibetan, it would be important to clearly distinguish rtsom rig as “literature” from rtsom rigs as “genre.” It may be mentioned in general that (a) Tibetan literary genre is very rich, diverse, and differentiated, (b) the principal criteria for distinguishing one literary genre from another seem to be the subject matter and topic (i.e. fields of knowledge), style, structure, scope, size, function, and the like of the literary work.