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 (Adroit, 2001).

Tenzin Namdak born in Tibet in 1926. He studied and practiced Bon religion in Yundrungling and Menri monasteries in central Tibet until 1960 when he was forced to move to Nepal. He obtained his Geshe degree in 1953. In 1961, he was invited to London to collaborate Professor D. Snellgrove in his Bon studies for three years. He returned to India to establish a Bonpo settlement in collaboration with Rev. Sangyay Tenjin, and then, founded another Bonpo monastery and educational center, Tritan Norbutse, in Kathmandu. He is now a most senior and established teacher of the Bon religion. It should also be noted that he compiled Tibetan-Zang Zung Dictionary, which made a firm basis of linguistic studies of Zhangzhung.

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.