Bonpo Thangkas from Rebkong

Musashi Tachikawa is professor at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, (Ph.D., Harvard University (1975); D. Litt., Nagoya University (1970-92). His publications include the Structure of the World of Udayana's Realism (Reidel, 1980), Fiver Hundred Buddhist Deities (Adroit, 2000), Three Hundred Sixty Buddhist Deities (Adro, 2001).

Yashuhiko Nagano born in 1946 in Saitama, Japan. He studied French linguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and continued his study at the Graduate School, University of Tokyo until he was nominated as a fellow of the Tibetan Seminar at the Toyo Bunko (Oriental Library). He left there in 1977 when he joined the Ph.D. program in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1983 he obtained his doctoral degree. His major research is Tibeto-Burman historical linguistics, with special focus on Tibetan and Gyalrong. His main publications are: A Historical Study of the rGyarong Verb System, A Morphological Index of Classical Tibetan, New Horizons in Tibeto-Burman Morphosyntax, and Time, Language and Cognition. He is a professor of linguistics at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, and has been leading an international project on Bon studies, in partnership with Dr. Samten G. Karmay of CNRS, Paris.