Lineages are important in many fields of Central Eurasian Studies. Whether it be the genealogies of the Secret History of the Mongols, the silsila of the Muslim Sufi houses, or the initiation lineages in Tibetan tantric teachings, our fields deal with lineages often traveling from the ancient lands to recent foundations.
When Uralic and Altaic studies began in the New World it was a new field, transplanted from the Old World where it was born. Professor Kara’s uq, his silsila, his initiation lineage is an especially distinguished one. His teacher was Louis Ligeti who had all his students write in French and take an Altaic surname if they did not already have an appropriately Ugrian one. Louis Ligeti in turn had studied with Paul Pelliot, the doyen of not just Sinology, but also Mongolistics and who (what is often ignored) began his Mongolian studies through a deep familiarity with the Persian history of Rashīd al-Dīn. Like many great gurus, however, Prof. Kara received initiations from many lineages, most notably that of Yüngshiyebü-yin Rinchen in Mongolia. And in St. Petersburg, he also received indirectly the lineage of Boris Ja. Vladimirtsov and the great Russian tradition of Mongolistics.
Residing in Bloomington and teaching in the Central Eurasian Studies department, he has thus given those of us working in the New World the fruit not merely of his own scholarship, intelligence, and (as he says with his usual self-deprecation) his “ragged memory,” but also the traditions of scholarship that he himself imbibed. Mixed with the other lineages in Indiana University’s Central Eurasian Studies Department, such as those of Yuri Bregel in Central Asian Studies, and Gombojab Hangin who founded the Mongolia Society, the lineage of György Kara has been a wishing jewel, a čindamani, to give it its Mongolian form, for his students, colleagues, and employers.
The čindamani was a wishing jewel, which solves all a kingdom’s budgetary woes by giving the prince who has it an unending supply of good things. In the jataka (čadig) legends about the Buddha’s earlier lives, the Buddha-to-be was born once upon a time as a prince whose couldn’t stop giving things away to any beggar who asked. His father, the king, remonstrated with him, saying that the money in the treasury which the prince was giving away was not free, but actually had to be collected from the sweat of the peasants. So the more he gave away, the more taxes they would have to pay. The prince saw the justice of this plea and realized the only solution that would allow him to keep giving endlessly without burdening the peasants was to find the wishing jewel in the mysterious isle far south in the Indian Ocean. The young prince then went on a mission to find this wishing jewel. We need not follow the entire story, but one may say that Professor György Kara has for many, many years been the philological čindamani, the wishing jewel in Indiana University’s Central Eurasian Studies Department. Whether it be Old Turkic or Ewenki or Altaic philology or the origin of the Hungarians, he has been able to fulfill the desires of colleagues and department chairs to have everything—I mean everything—covered on one salary. Let us rejoice in this light while we have it.
In the tradition of festschrift, we have another point of contact between our academic rituals and the Central Eurasian religious traditions lies in. In this tradition, students express their gratitude to their teacher and by demonstrating what use they have made of his teaching. Likewise in the famous danshig or bat orshil ritual that is practiced in Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhist traditions, disciples ask the guru to remain in this world, expressing their desire for many more years of teaching. And so we also fulfill this custom on the present occasion. And the “we” here that follow this tradition includes not just Mongolian studies, but many fellow students in Altaic, Turkic, Manchu-Tungusic, Central Asian, and Tibetan studies. By remembering and honoring our teacher, we also have occasion to remind ourselves of the too often slighted discipline of Philology, what James Turner reminds us is the “Forgotten Origin of the Modern Humanities.” The great life-work of Professor Kara testifies to philology’s importance, and the intellectual spirit it can express in the hands of its greatest practitioners such as he is. Tümen nasulatughai!
Christopher P. Atwood
Philadelphia, April 2017