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Bibliographical Sources for Buddhist Studies, from the Viewpoint of Buddhist Philology By Yasuhiro Sueki. (Bibliographica Indica et Buddhica, III), pp. xxii, 195. Tokyo, The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 1998.

Any reviewer of any bibliographical reference work is inevitably faced with the ticklish problem of how to draw attention politely to items which may well have been missed simply by reason of the time lag between their publication and the opportunity to register them for inclusion on the basis of personal inspection; obviously the time lag involved in publishing the reference work itself also has to be brought into consideration. It came as a very welcome surprise, therefore, to find that Yasuhiro Sueki is a bibliographer so exercised by this problem that he has produced a supplement to his first compilation even while this reviewer was pondering what to say on the topic. With such a mustard keen attitude to bibliographical control, the International Institute for Buddhist Studies, an institution of which we all have the highest hopes by reason of the excellence of its staff, certainly looks set to fulfill our most optimistic expectations. Of course these volumes are not beyond criticism: their intention is to provide a sort of broadly conceived bibliography of bibliographies in Buddhist studies based primarily on the canonical and associated literatures of Buddhism, encompassing in particular surveys of that literature and of its study, with the result that the limits to the type of work included, clear enough in the case of a formal bibliography of bibliographies, is actually quite blurred. There are, after all, some quite helpful introductory surveys contained in encyclopedias, though these are apparently excluded here. What we do get is useful, but sporadic, annotation, with reviews too noted in many instances, but against this the indexes are to authors (albeit including institutional authors) only, so there is no alphabetical list of titles, making the reader unduly dependent on the compiler's system of classification, which relegates many useful works to smaller print entries than those which attract a full entry classified under that scheme. And, of course, one might add specific complaints. For example, J. W. de Jong's history of Buddhist studies in its splendid 1997 edition, though missed by the first volume, is caught by its supplement, but the annotation might have remarked on. the ample indexes by text and by author which that edition contains, since they go to make it a much more congenial work of reference than any of its predecessors. The bibliography of Chinese mainland publications on religion by Wang Leiquan, the value of which for Manichaean studies I have already pointed out in this journal (IX, 1999, p. 24) could also have been listed as giving access to a secondary literature of ever improving quality. But that a reference work of this type should be not entirely easy to use and slightly less than comprehensive will come as no surprise to any reader, and especially to any reader who has ever tried to compile a bibliography of any sort. Such defects weigh for little against its equally obvious strengths. There is no other work like this; it is a mine of information which will undoubtedly teach something new to all, save perhaps the most senior and erudite scholars in the field; it displays a level of bibliographic vigilance on the part of the compiler which we cannot but applaud and even more importantly try to support. We can only look forward to future publications with due gratitude for what has already been achieved.