The Treasury of Lives

Lobzang Mingyur Dorje (blo bzang mi 'gyur rdo rje), popularly known as L.M. Dorje, was born in 1875 in either northern India or Sikkim. He was the elder brother of Rai Sahib Wangdi, who served as a clerk for the Gyantse Trade Agency.^[1] From the age of ten he was educated at Yiga Choling Monastery (yid dga chos gling), which was founded in 1875 by his teacher Geshe Sokpo Sherab Gyatso (sog po shes rab rgya mtsho, d. 1909). Located in Darjeeling, Yiga Choling was a hub of activity for British and other foreigners seeking access to information on Tibet.^[2] The chronology of his life's work can be patched together from reports on scholarly projects on which he collaborated and from materials and information shared by his descendants in Darjeeling and Canada.

L.M. Dorje left the monastery when he was twenty-five years old, and began his thirty-year tenure as teacher at Darjeeling High School, where he would ultimately become Head Lama. He also began to work with Sarat Chandra Das (1849-1917) on his Tibet-English Dictionary, which was published in 1902 by Calcutta University without any acknowledgement of his contribution. According to a short biographical sketch of L.M. Dorje by W.Y. Evans Wentz (1878-1965), L.M. Dorje and his teacher Sherab Gyatso were responsible for compiling the famous dictionary:

At this task of compilation, Lāma Lobzang Mingyur Dorje worked for almost five years; and, although it was due to him, assisted by his guru in the Ghoom monastery, more than to the Rai Bahādur, that the dictionary was accurately arranged, unfortunately no credit was given to him or his guru [Sherab Gyatso] in the preface.^[3]

Sherab Gyatso was in fact given credit in the Tibetan title page of the dictionary, although L.M. Dorje was not.^[4]

L.M. Dorje acted as guide and interpreter for the Roerich family on their 1924 trip to Sikkim.^[5] The Russian-born Roerichs—Nikolai (1874-1947) and his two sons George (1902-1960) and Sviatoslav (1904-1993)—shared a deep fascination with eastern religions. They arrived in India following an extended stay in the United States, where Nikolai had shown his paintings and George and Sviatoslav had studied at Harvard. Once in India they stayed in Darjeeling at a home known locally as Talai Phodrang (ta la'i pho brang); the residence had earned the name for having sheltered the Thirteenth Dalai Lama during his exile in 1910 to 1912.^[6] The family had hoped to travel next to Tibet but they lacked the funds and necessary permissions.^[7] Instead they travelled to Sikkim, then a British protectorate. Beginning in Darjeeling on February 15, they travelled in a large caravan and stopped at Tashiding (bkra shis lding), Pemayangtse (padma yang rtse), Dubdi Sang-ngak Dorje Den (sgrub sde gsang sngag rdo rje gdan), Sang-ngak Choling (gsang sngags chos gling), Doling (rdo gling) and Ralang Karma Rabtenling (ra langs karma rab brtan gling) monasteries.^[8] They returned to Darjeeling on February 24.

At some point L.M. Dorje married Dawa Zangmo (zla ba bzang mo), whose family were major patrons of the monastery at Ghum.^[9] They adopted Dawa Zangmo's niece, Diki Lhamo (sde skyid lha mo), the daughter of her deceased sister.^[10] Diki Lhamo would later marry Lobzang Phuntsok Lhalungpa (lha lung pa blo bzang phun tshog, 1926-2008) and would work producing and delivering Tibetan-language broadcasts for the Tibetan Division of All India Radio.

In 1930, L.M. Dorje retired from his position as Head Lama at Darjeeling High School. The following year, in 1931, he officially joined the staff of the Roerich family's Urusvati Himalayan Research Institute in Naggar in the Kullu Valley, having previously been elected a "Correspondent Member of the Society of the Roerich Museum" in 1928.^[11] For the next several years he worked closely on numerous projects with George Roerich, who credited him in the preface of Trails to Innermost Asia as follows: "To Lama Lobzang Mingyur Dorje, my teacher and friend, for his untiring help in my Tibetan studies."^[12] In Heart of Asia, Nikolai Roerich described L.M. Dorje as a "well-known scholar of Tibetan literature and teacher of most of the European Tibetologists."^[13]

In addition to research into materia medica based on the Tibetan medical tradition, L.M. Dorje began work with George Roerich on a Tibetan English Dictionary in 1931.^[14] According to a 1933 Urusvati leaflet held by the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York, the project was projected to be completed in 1934, while a collection of subscription inquiries held in the Archives of the Roerich Museum in Moscow reveals widespread interest in the dictionary from museums, universities and libraries around the world, evidence that the Roerichs had widely publicized the project well before substantial work had begun.^[15] A work schedule, also from the Moscow museum, includes five specific tasks related to dictionary research and writing for L.M. Dorje from Roerich dated January 11, 1934. The same collection also contains correspondence indicating that the project had become delayed.^[16] In a great many of these letters, Lama Lobzang Mingyur Dorje is listed along with George Roerich as collaborator.

Among the items preserved in the papers of Lobsang Phuntsok Lhalungpa is a dictionary entitled The Student's practical dictionary containing English words with English and Hindi meanings in Deva Nagri character, which was published in 1904 by Ram Narain Lal in Allahabad. The inside of the book is signed "Lama Lobzang Mingyur, H[ead] Lama, D.H. High School, 10/12/11." It contains heavy annotations in Tibetan and may have been one of several sources consulted for his life-long dictionary research. Other sources, which are mentioned in several letters to the Urusvati secretary Shibayev include the dictionaries of Kazi Dawa Samdup (ka dzi zla ba bsam 'grub, 1968-1922), H.A. Jaschke (1817-1883), and Charles Bell (1870-1945).

In a 1935 letter preserved in the Moscow Roerich Museum, L.M. Dorje wrote to the Roerichs' secretary Shibayev that he had completed the "A" section of the dictionary, which contained 1,300 entries. He indicated that the "B" section would contain approximately 1,000 entries.  A response from Shibayev to L.M. Dorje asked that he not publish it elsewhere. In a subsequent letter dated May 21, 1935, L.M. Dorje indicated that the project would take at least one and a half more years to complete the work.^[17]

However, a report covering the years 1954-1955 in the National Archives of India notes that by 1942 work on the dictionary was paused. The same report, which primarily covers the government's assessment of whether to support a Tibetan school in Kalimpong, also documents the question of whether to support the unfinished dictionary manuscript.^[18]

On August 1, 1935, Lobzang Mingyur Dorje was appointed lecturer in Tibetan at Calcutta University, filling the position previously held by Kazi Dawa Samdup and Karma Sumdhon Paul. That same year L.M. Dorje and Karma Sumdhon Paul began working with W.Y. Evans-Wentz to complete work on a translation project that had been initiated in the 1920s by Evans-Wentz and Kazi Dawa Samdup, who had passed away in 1922. The work was the second section of Karma Lingpa’s Peaceful and Wrathful Deities (kar gling zhi khro), a revelation of the fourteenth-century Tibetan mystic Karma Lingpa (karma gling pa). Decades later, in 1954, this work would be published along with the translations of Kazi Dawa Samdup and S.W. Laden La as The Tibetan book of the great liberation, or the method of realizing Nirvāṇa through knowing the mind: preceded by an epitome of Padma-Sambhava's biography and followed by Guru Phadampa Sangay's teachings, according to English renderings by Sardar Bahādur S.W. Laden La and by the Lāmas Karma Sumdhon Paul, Lobzang Mingyur Dorje, and Kazi Dawa-Samdup.^[19]

L.M. Dorje died suddenly of a heart attack in 1948.

Letters preserved by the Darjeeling family of L.M. Dorje include Dawa Zangmo's correspondence with Calcutta University on the topic of the publication of L.M. Dorje's language textbooks and the dictionary. These letters began in 1948 and continued for eight years. The Tibetan Reader was ultimately published in three volumes in 1951. Still, a completed Tibetan-English-Sanskrit dictionary would not be published until decades later, and not in India. In 1983, the Tibetan-English-Russian Dictionary with Sanskrit Parallels, attributed solely to George Roerich and edited by Yuri Parfionovich and Vilena Dylykova, was published in multiple volumes in Moscow by the USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of Oriental Studies. This edition does not mention L.M. Dorje's involvement in the earlier stages of the dictionary project. A second edition was published in 2019.

 

_________________________________________________

Publication of this biography was made possible through support of National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Additional Bios Sponsored By National Endowment for the Humanities