A Road Less Traveled. Felicitation Volume in Honor of John Taber
Vincent Eltschinger, Birgit Kellner, Ethan Mills and Isabelle Ratié. A Road Less Traveled. Felicitation Volume in Honor of John Taber. Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde. 2021, 100, 542 p. [Read the book in open access on the publisher’s website]
We are pleased to announce the publication of the hundredth volume of the Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde, in honour of John Taber. Two members of our team, EA2120, participated in the co-edition of this book: Vincent Eltschinger and Isabelle Ratié.
We transcribe here the first lines of the introduction:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
The reference to Robert Frost’s famous poem in the title of this volume in honor of John Taber is not (or not entirely) due to the editors’ personal inclination: not only did Taber himself publish an essay whose title directly alludes to the same, he seems to have chosen the “less traveled” of two diverging roads at every turn of his career. His insatiable curiosity must have made those choices as painful as the ones of Frost’s poem. Taber’s published works amply demonstrate that, equipped as he was with a vast knowledge of both Western and Indian philosophical traditions, he could have traveled all the paths he did not choose. Yet, in Frost’s words, he could not have traveled them all and been “one traveler”; the choices he made resulted in a unique intellectual trajectory, one that has made him one of the most distinguished historians and interpreters of Indian philosophy in the world today.