2010 Reprint of 1927 First Edition. Lieutenant Colonel Laurence Austine Waddell (1854 - 1938) was a British explorer, collector in Tibet, and author. He traveled in India throughout the 1890s (including Sikkim and areas on the borders of Nepal and Tibet) and wrote about the Tibetan Buddhist religious practices he observed there. In his later works he tried to synthesize Western and Near Eastern cultures. In this work he proposes an Aryan (i.e., Indo-European) origin of the alphabet. His point of departure is the presumed Semitic origin of the Alphabet, against which he makes an argument for...

Laurence Austine Waddell (1854-1938) qualified in medicine and chemistry at Glasgow University and in 1880 embarked on a successful career in the colonial Indian Medical Service which took him to Darjeeling, Burma and Tibet, and eventually an academic post at Calcutta Medical College. In addition, Waddell studied Sanskrit and published extensively on Tibet (his books Among the Himalayas (1899) and Lhasa and its Mysteries (1905) are also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection). This landmark study of Tibetan Buddhism first appeared in 1895. Waddell cites earlier European scholarship,...