Vol 22, No 3 (2025)

This article continues the introduced and commented publication of translated works of one of the founders of Shaykhism, Sayyid Kazim Rashti, from the collection of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The translation of this treatise, rendered for the first time into a European language, has been made from a manuscript and a lithography.

In the Buddhist Mahāyāna school Madhyamaka-Prāsaṅgika, the possibility of sense perception — one of the two (along with logical inference) instruments of cognition recognized in Buddhism — is under question. If all differences are false, being determined by ignorance that obscures saṃsāric consciousness, then perception appears, at first glance, to be impossible, since there is neither a perceiving subject nor a perceived object. Unlike the Yogācārins, the Prāsaṅgikas exclude the possibility of preverbal perception: it is always conceptually laden with the distinction between the subject and the object. However, in fact, perception is impossible only at the level of absolute reality, while at the level of relative reality it exists — but its object is not so much external objects as the fruits of a person’s karmically significant past actions, appearing as “external” objects. Therefore, the theory of perception in Prāsaṅgika must be viewed not through the prism of the correspondence theory, but through that of the coherence or pragmatic theories of truth.

This article contains the first Russian translation of the chapter “Turkish, Arab and Persian Wrestling” in the illuminated manuscript on Mamluk warfare copied in AD 1474 and currently housed at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences under shelf-mark C 686. The study focuses on the historical context and traditions of wrestling originating from Central Asia and Mongolia. Special terms used in the manuscript, which are loanwords from Persian and Turkic languages, are discussed and interpreted. The author also examines a miniature depicting wrestlers, its style, features, as well as the origins of this artistic tradition.

The final essay in a series of articles about the events and people who stood at the origins of West Semitic epigraphy in Europe is an overview of the last Orientalist works in the life of Barthélemy in the 60s of the 18th century, his close relations with opponents and the five-year pause in scholarly work, which was the result of the abbot’s friendly solidarity with his disgraced patron, the Duke de Choiseul, who was exiled from Paris to Chanteloup. The Duke’s return to the capital and the subsequent many years of the abbot’s hard work on a multi-volume archaeological novel were crowned with the triumphal march of Anacharsis across Europe on the very eve of the French Revolution, although this triumph did not prevent Barthélemy from perceiving the decline of his life as a “chain of misfortunes” and “the revenge of fate”.

The article deals with the history of early acquisitions of Korean books by the Asiatic Museum — namely, nine texts from the so-called “Brosset collection”. This collection includes books from various collectors mentioned in the handwritten catalogue of Chinese, Manchu, multilingual, Japanese and Korean books from the collection of the Asiatic Museum compiled by Academician Marie-Félicité Brosset. The paper centers on the identification of records from this catalogue with books currently kept at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, proving their origin from the libraries of Paul Ludwig Schilling von Canstadt and Stepan Vasilievich Lipovtsov on the basis of archival data, and substantiating the assumption that those collectors most likely obtained them from members of the Russian Orthodox Mission in Beijing (including Hyacinth Bichurin).