Download or read book Buddhist Himalayas written by Olivier Föllmi and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book invites the reader on a journey to an exotic land and into one’s heart and soul. The pictures are accompanied throughout by contributions from nineteen eminent specialists on the region, who discuss the culture, customs, politics and faith of the Himalayan world; past and present. Reflecting not only the cycle of human existence but also the history of the Himalayas, this lavish volume offers an unparalleled insight into Himalayan Buddhism in the 21st century.
Download or read book Great Game in the Buddhist Himalayas written by Phunchok Stobdan and published by Vintage Books. This book was released on 2019-10-21 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a new 'great game' being played in the Buddhist Himalayas between India, China and Tibet, which makes for a crucial third player. Together, they are leveraging their influence with the Buddhist communities to create strategic dominance, with varying degrees of success. China's 'Buddhist diplomacy' has focused on Nepal and Bhutan, and the Indian Himalayan regions of Ladakh, Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim, which have sizeable Buddhist populations and are vulnerable to this influence. The crisis in Doklam brought into focus what will be one of the most difficult issues to unfold in the Himalayas in future: India's insufficient ability to deal with China only through the prism of military power. If Xi Jinping, who is known to be working towards a resolution of the Tibet question, succeeds, and the Dalai Lama does indeed return to Tibet, how will it impact Indian interests in the Buddhist Himalayas? If the Tibet issue remains unresolved, how will India and China deal with and leverage the sectarian strife that is likely to intensify in a post-Dalai Lama world? The Great Game in the Buddhist Himalayas includes several unknown insights into the India-China, India-Tibet and China-Tibet relationships. It reads like a geopolitical thriller, taking the reader through the intricacies of reincarnation politics, competing spheres of sacred influence, and monastic and sectarian allegiances that will keep the Himalayas on edge for years to come.
Download or read book The Yogins of Ladakh written by John Crook and published by Motilal Banarsidass Publ.. This book was released on 1997 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When John Crock of Bristol University began research in the Zangskar valley of Ladakh in 1977 his prime intention was to investigate the social anthropology of the area through studies of village life. In 1986 Crook returned to Ladakh with into the social organisation, history, meditational practices and philosophy of the yogins who still lived and practiced in the remote parts of the area. This book is a record of the author's adventurous journeys to meet some remarkable men. The yogins were often generous, providing accounts of their training, one of them allowing Crook to photograph a Mahamudra by the eminent Tipun Padma of this difficult work together with that of a biography of the great women yogin Machig Labdron provides the basis for extensive and original discussions of the meaning of Tibetan Buddhism and it's significance in our time.
Download or read book Being a Buddhist Nun written by Kim Gutschow and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They may shave their heads, don simple robes, and renounce materialism and worldly desires. But the women seeking enlightenment in a Buddhist nunnery high in the folds of Himalayan Kashmir invariably find themselves subject to the tyrannies of subsistence, subordination, and sexuality. Ultimately, Buddhist monasticism reflects the very world it is supposed to renounce. Butter and barley prove to be as critical to monastic life as merit and meditation. Kim Gutschow lived for more than three years among these women, collecting their stories, observing their ways, studying their lives. Her book offers the first ethnography of Tibetan Buddhist society from the perspective of its nuns. Gutschow depicts a gender hierarchy where nuns serve and monks direct, where monks bless the fields and kitchens while nuns toil in them. Monasteries may retain historical endowments and significant political and social power, yet global flows of capitalism, tourism, and feminism have begun to erode the balance of power between monks and nuns. Despite the obstacles of being considered impure and inferior, nuns engage in everyday forms of resistance to pursue their ascetic and personal goals. A richly textured picture of the little known culture of a Buddhist nunnery, the book offers moving narratives of nuns struggling with the Buddhist discipline of detachment. Its analysis of the way in which gender and sexuality construct ritual and social power provides valuable insight into the relationship between women and religion in South Asia today.
Download or read book So Close to Heaven written by Barbara Crossette and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1996-06-25 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A travelogue of Bhutan and its neighbors in the Himalayas that introduces readers to a world that has emerged from the middle ages only to find itself peering into the abyss of modernity. "For anyone with a serious interest in Buddhism, it's essential reading" (Washington Post Book World). For more than a thousand years Tibet, Sikkim, Ladakh, and Bhutan were the santuaries of Tantric Buddhism. But in the last half of this century, geopolitics has scoured the landscape of the Himalayas, and only the reclusive kingdom of Bhutan remains true to Tantric Buddhism.
Download or read book Fortress Monasteries of the Himalayas written by Peter Harrison and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-08-20 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The spread of Buddism and Tibetan secular power throughout the Himalayas led to a distinctive style of fortifications not found anywhere else. This book looks at Himalayan fortifications, from their creation in the Middle Ages to their destruction and capture by the Chinese in the 20th century.
Download or read book An Atlas of the Himalayas by a 19th Century Tibetan Lama written by Diana Lange and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-06-08 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diana Lange's patient investigations have, in this wonderful piece of detective work, solved the mysteries of six extraordinary panoramic maps of routes across Tibet and the Himalayas, clearly hand-drawn in the late 1850s by a local artist, known as the British Library's Wise Collection. Diana Lange now reveals not only the previously unknown identity of the Scottish colonial official who commissioned the maps from a Tibetan Buddhist lama, but also the story of how the Wise Collection came to be in the British Library. The result is both a spectacular illustrated ethnographic atlas and a unique compendium of knowledge concerning the mid-19th century Tibetan world, as well as a remarkable account of an academic journey of discovery. It will entertain and inform anyone with an interest in this fascinating region. This large format book is lavishly illustrated in colour and includes four separate large foldout maps.
Download or read book Tendrel written by Harold Talbott and published by . This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tendrel tells the story of a gifted young man who grows up in a sophisticated Upper East Side household in the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s he rubs elbows with many famous people-Noël Coward, Truman Capote, Greta Garbo, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Dwight Eisenhower, and others. After he's dismissed from St. Paul's School his senior year, he frequents gay bars and discovers his sexuality. As an intellectually precocious teenager he finds himself drawn to Medieval studies, French literature, and Buddhism. While at Harvard he converts to Catholicism. After many twists and turns, traveling to France, Greece, and Italy, making friends and indulging in flings, he graduates. Two weeks later, his mother jumps to her death from a window of their upper Fifth Avenue apartment. Months later, the author suffers a nervous breakdown. His recovery connects him with the renowned piano duo, Arthur Gold and Bobby Fizdale, and through them many of New York's great artists, including Tanny and George Balanchine, Samuel Barber, Stella Adler, John Housman, and Cicely Tyson, all of whom are part of Tendrel's melody. In 1967 his mentor, the Benedictine monk and theologian Dom Aelred Graham, invites the author to accompany him as his secretary on a year-long journey to Asia to meet with non-Christian religious leaders. During that year the author is accepted as a private student by the Dalai Lama, who tells him, "I will¿make you my monk in America." In 1968 the author acts as Thomas Merton's guide to Tibetan lamas in the Indian Himalayas; he houses the great Cistercian monk in his small bungalow in Darjeeling. Merton confronts the author, telling him: "You've got to get it straight kid: what the Tibetan tradition has to offer us is dzogchen and that's where it's at¿[So] if you want to know¿find a dzogchen yogi." Merton dies a month later in a Bangkok hotel. The author finds his Dzogchen yogi, Lama Gyurda-la, outside Darjeeling. He enters the path of Dzogchen and discovers his life's work: understanding the mind's nature mind, of being liberated from life's ups and downs.
Download or read book Himalayan Dialogue written by Stan Mumford and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mountain valleys of Nepal, Tibetan communities have long been established through migrations from the North. Because of these migrations over the last few centuries, Tibetan lamaism, as one of the world's great ritual traditions, can be studied in the Himalayas as a process that emerges through dialogue with the more ancient shamanic tradition which it confronts and criticizes. Here for the first time is a thorough anthropological study of Tibetan lamaism combining textual analysis with richly contextualized ethnographic data. The rites studied are of the Nyingma Tibetan Buddhist tradition. In contrast to the textual analyses that have viewed the culture as a finished entity, here we see an unbounded ritual process with unfinished interpretations. Mumford's focus is on the "dialogue" taking place between the lamaist and the shamanic regimes, as a historic development occurring between different cultural layers. The study powerfully demonstrates that interrelationships between subsystems within a given cultural matrix over time are critical to an understanding of religion as a cultural process.
Download or read book Hidden Lands in Himalayan Myth and History written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hidden Lands in Himalayan Myth and History showcases recent scholarship, photo essays, maps, and translations about hidden lands (sbas yul) across the Himalaya, from historical and contemporary perspectives.
Download or read book Hollywood to the Himalayas written by Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswati and published by Jaico Publishing House. This book was released on 2022-10-07 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Journey of Healing and Transformation An enlightening memoir of a reluctant spiritual seeker who finds much more than she bargained for when she travels to India. Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswati, from Hollywood, California, had a privileged upbringing that hid some dark secrets. She grappled with an eating disorder and trauma from her early childhood for years. But, as a Stanford grad getting her PhD in Psychology, she felt she was successfully navigating adulthood. After getting married, when she agreed to travel to India to appease her husband, little did Sadhviji know a journey of healing and awakening awaited her. She had everything the material world could offer. Soon, she would give it all up to follow the divine path. Hollywood to the Himalayas describes Sadhviji’s odyssey towards divine enlightenment and inspiration through her extraordinary connection with her guru and renewed confidence in the pleasure and joy that life can bring. Now one of the preeminent female spiritual teachers in the world, Sadhviji recounts her journey with wit, honesty, and clarity. Along the way, she offers teachings to help us all step onto our own path of awakening and discover the truth of who we really are—embodiments of the Divine. Americanborn Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswati, PhD, moved to India in 1996. A graduate of Stanford University, she was ordained by Pujya Swami Chidanand Saraswati, president of one of the largest interfaith institutions in India, into the tradition of sanyas and lives at the Parmarth Niketan ashram in Rishikesh, where she leads a variety of humanitarian projects, teaches meditation, gives spiritual discourses, and counsels individuals and families. Americanborn Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswati, PhD, moved to India in 1996. A graduate of Stanford University, she was ordained by Pujya Swami Chidanand Saraswati, president of one of the largest interfaith institutions in India, into the tradition of sanyas and lives at the Parmarth Niketan ashram in Rishikesh, where she leads a variety of humanitarian projects, teaches meditation, gives spiritual discourses, and counsels individuals and families.
Download or read book The Heart of the World written by Ian Baker and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legend of Shangri-La emerged from the Tibetan Buddhist belief in beyul, or hidden lands. Tibetan prophecies proclaim that the greatest of these mythical sanctuaries lies at the eastern edge of the Himalayas, veiled by a colossal waterfall at the heart of the forbidding Tsangpo gorge. After years of research and investigation, Buddhist scholar and world-class climber Ian Baker and his team made worldwide news by reaching the bottom of the Tsangpo gorge and finding a magnificent 108-foot-high waterfall - the legendary grail of both Western explorers and Tibetan seekers. The Heart of the World recounts one of the most captivating stories of exploration and discovery in recent memory - an extraordinary journey into one of the wildest and most inaccessible places on earth, a meditation on our place in nature, and a pilgrimage to the heart of Tibetan Buddhism.
Download or read book Creating the Universe written by Eric Huntington and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2018 Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities Buddhist representations of the cosmos across nearly two thousand years of history in Tibet, Nepal, and India show that cosmology is a rich language for the expression of diverse religious ideas, with cosmological thinking at the center of Buddhist thought, art, and practice. In Creating the Universe, Eric Huntington presents examples of visual art and architecture, primary texts, ritual ideologies, and material practices—accompanied by extensive explanatory diagrams—to reveal the immense complexity of cosmological thinking in Himalayan Buddhism. Employing comparisons across function, medium, culture, and history, he exposes cosmology as a fundamental mode of engagement with numerous aspects of religion, from preliminary lessons to the highest rituals for enlightenment. This wide-ranging work will interest scholars and students of many fields, including Buddhist studies, religious studies, art history, and area studies. Art History Publication Initiative. For more information, visit http://arthistorypi.org/books/creating-the-universe
Download or read book Circling the Sacred Mountain written by Robert A. F. Thurman and published by Bantam. This book was released on 1999 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicling the inner as well as the outer journey, an influential author offers his personal view of his spiritual adventure amid the breathtaking vistas of the Himalayas.
Download or read book Hidden Treasures of the Himalayas written by Amy Heller and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By studying these texts within and examining the styles of the manuscript illuminations, Amy Heller was able to shed light on the lost history of this remote Tibetan enclave, the spread of Buddhism in the Himalayas and its artistic legacy. The manuscripts, sculptures and mural paintings discovered in Dolpo are the concrete expression of the complex economic, political, artistic and religious interactions between the people of Dolpo and their neighbors in India, Nepal and Tibet. --
Download or read book Renunciation and Longing written by Annabella Pitkin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-05-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the eventful life of a Himalayan Buddhist teacher, Khunu Lama, this study reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern. In the early twentieth century, Khunu Lama journeyed across Tibet and India, meeting Buddhist masters while sometimes living, so his students say, on cold porridge and water. Yet this elusive wandering renunciant became a revered teacher of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At Khunu Lama’s death in 1977, he was mourned by Himalayan nuns, Tibetan lamas, and American meditators alike. The many surviving stories about him reveal significant dimensions of Tibetan Buddhism, shedding new light on questions of religious affect and memory that reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern. In Renunciation and Longing, Annabella Pitkin explores devotion, renunciation, and the teacher-student lineage relationship as resources for understanding Tibetan Buddhist approaches to modernity. By examining narrative accounts of the life of a remarkable twentieth-century Himalayan Buddhist and focusing on his remembered identity as a renunciant bodhisattva, Pitkin illuminates Tibetan and Himalayan practices of memory, affective connection, and mourning. Refuting long-standing caricatures of Tibetan Buddhist communities as unable to be modern because of their religious commitments, Pitkin shows instead how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist narrators have used themes of renunciation, devotion, and lineage as touchstones for negotiating loss and vitalizing continuity.
Download or read book An End to Suffering written by Pankaj Mishra and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-08-24 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An End to Suffering is a deeply original and provocative book about the Buddha's life and his influence throughout history, told in the form of the author's search to understand the Buddha's relevance in a world where class oppression and religious violence are rife, and where poverty and terrorism cast a long, constant shadow. Mishra describes his restless journeys into India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, among Islamists and the emerging Hindu middle class, looking for this most enigmatic of religious figures, exploring the myths and places of the Buddha's life, and discussing Western explorers' "discovery" of Buddhism in the nineteenth century. He also considers the impact of Buddhist ideas on such modern politicians as Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. As he reflects on his travels and on his own past, Mishra shows how the Buddha wrestled with problems of personal identity, alienation, and suffering in his own, no less bewildering, times. In the process Mishra discovers the living meaning of the Buddha's teaching, in the world and for himself. The result is the most three-dimensional, convincing book on the Buddha that we have.
