She-rab Dong bu

Sacred Texts Buddhism 

Notes to the hypertext transcription

The She-rab Dong-bu is an ethical treatise written by the illustrious Nagarjuna. Although he is celebrated as one of the most subtle thinkers that Buddhism, and indeed the world, has ever produced, this work is fairly simple and intended for a broad audience. Particularly striking is the (nearly rabid) misogyny, a feature fully in keeping with the time and place of composition, but one that we might wish not to see in the writing of the grand formulator of the Madhyamika school of philosophy.

In the original text the Tibetan and the English translation face each other on opposite pages. In this edition, only the English has been reproduced. There is also some Tibetan in the footnotes, and this is shown in Unicode and not transcribed. The only unicode font I can find at the time of publication (June 2002) that will display Tibetan (under Windows) is Arial Unicode MS Font for Publisher 2000. It is absolutely massive (about 23 MB), but it is probably one of the most complete Unicode fonts freely available. I have placed all of the combining Tibetan characters after their roots, which may not display properly in a fully-implemented Tibetan Font (which the MS Arial Unicode is not), but is the way that the characters would be transcribed and pronounced (if all of the characters were pronouncing). This may need to be corrected in a future edition.

NOTE: The Microsoft font is no longer available for download. For more information about unicode at sacred-texts, refer to this page.(JBH)

There were three corrigenda bound into the copy that I scanned from. These have been added to the original text after the text that they are meant to replace, enclosed in brackets [ ].