Download or read book The Twenty Five Great Sites of Khams written by Alexander Patten Gardner and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is an exploration of a narrative map known as "The Twenty-five Great Sites of Khams." The map is a descriptive list of forty-two religious sites in the southwestern Sino-Tibetan borderlands. It was set forth in two separate versions in the second half of the nineteenth century. As an articulation of regional identity, the map projected religious and social values onto the mountainous terrain and established a geographic representation of Khams that included neither political borders nor administrative structure. Chapter One uses the initial version of the narrative map, produced in 1857 by the treasure revealer (gter ston) Mchog gyur gling pa (1829-1870), to investigate three interrelated issues: (1) the category of "sacred geography," (2) Tibetan strategies of representing space, and (3) the means by which its author used landscape to legitimate himself and his revelations, or "treasures" (gter ma, texts or objects said to have been concealed in the soil of Tibet to be discovered when the time was right). Chapter Two examines the normative tropes of treasure revelation narrative and finds that many elements of a given treasure's history are determined by certain narrative requirements that the tradition continues to maintain. I also argue that in some cases the rituals of revelation were performed not to produce treasure but to consecrate religious sites. Chapter Three examines the second version of the narrative map, composed by 'Jam mgon Kong sprul (1813-1899) in 1867. He composed it at a time when Khams's territorial integrity was threatened by an invading Tibetan army. The author is widely credited in the west with founding the so-called the "Rimay movement" which was supposedly a response to centuries of Tibetan sectarian prejudice and violence. This chapter reads the narrative map in a way that undermines that notion. It argues that while the map was in some ways a model of nonsectarianism, as it included sites associated with nearly all denominations of Tibetan Buddhism, it pointedly excluded from the religious geography of Khams the Dge lugs pa sect which at that time controlled the Tibetan government and army. In this way it established a geographic representation of Khams that symbolically preserved Khams's independence from Lhasa.
Download or read book The Social Life of Tibetan Biography written by Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-07-30 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Social Life of Tibetan Biography explores the creation of Tibetan religious authority in Tibetan cultural areas throughout East, Inner, and South Asia through engaging with the relationship between textual biography and social community in the case of the Eastern Tibetan yogi Tokden Shakya Shri (1853–1919). It explores the different mechanisms used by Shakya Shri’s community in the creation of his biographical portrait to develop his lineage, including the use of biographical tropes, details of interpersonal connections, educational and patronage networks, and representations of sacred site creation and maintenance. In doing so, this study decenters Tibetan and Himalayan religious history through recognizing that peripheries could act as alternative centers of authority for diverse Tibetan Buddhist communities.
Download or read book Singer of the Land of Snows written by Rachel H. Pang and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2024-03-13 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The singular role of Shabkar in the development of the idea of Tibet Shabkar (1781–1851), the “Singer of the Land of Snows,” was a renowned yogi and poet who, through his autobiography and songs, developed a vision of Tibet as a Buddhist “imagined community.” By incorporating vernacular literature, providing a narrative mapping of the Tibetan plateau, reviving and adapting the legend of Tibetans as Avalokiteśvara’s chosen people, and promoting shared Buddhist values and practices, Shabkar’s concept of Tibet opened up the discursive space for the articulation of modern forms of Tibetan nationalism. Employing analytical lenses of cultural nationalism and literary studies, Rachel Pang explores the indigenous epistemologies of identity, community, and territory that predate contemporary state-centric definitions of nation and nationalism in Tibet and provides the definitive treatment of this foundational figure.
Download or read book The Life of Jamgon Kongtrul the Great written by Alexander Gardner and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first-ever extensive biography of Tibet's most famous nonsectarian Buddhist lama Known as the “king of renunciates,” Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye (1813–1899) forever changed the face of Buddhism through collecting, arranging, and disseminating the various lineage traditions of Tibet across sectarian lines. His extensive treasury collections of profound Buddhist teachings continue to be taught and transmitted throughout the Himalayas by all major traditions and represent the breadth and profundity of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and practice. Jamgon Kongtrul was a polymath, dedicated retreatant, ritual expert, writer, and teacher from the eastern Tibetan kingdom of Derge. During the nineteenth century, while central Tibet experienced extreme sectarian divides, Jamgon Kongtrul, along with Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo and Chokgyur Lingpa, set about collecting, teaching, and transmitting the major practice traditions found in Tibet. Their activity—much of which did not adhere to the traditional divides of the Tibetan “schools” and included both tantric lineages coming from India as well as Tibetan treasure (terma) lineages—is one of the finest examples of Tibetan ecumenism, or Rimay, and Jamgon Kongtrul is perhaps the most famous among Tibet’s Rimay masters. This is the most accessible work available on Jamgon Kongtrul’s life, writings, and influence, written as a truly engaging historical biography. Alexander Gardner provides an intimate glimpse into the life of one of the most important Tibetan Buddhist teachers to have ever lived.
Download or read book The Just King written by Jamgon Mipham and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2017-07-18 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A translation of a popular Buddhist work on worldly ethics by Tibet's most famous philosopher. Leadership. Power. Responsibility. From Sun Tzu to Plato to Machiavelli, sages east and west have advised kings and rulers on how to lead. Their motivations and techniques have varied, but one thing they all have had in common is that their advice has been as relevant to the millions who have read their works as it has been to the few kings and princes they were, on the surface, addressed to. The nineteenth-century Buddhist monk and luminary Jamgön Mipham’s letter to the king of Dergé, whose small kingdom straddled China and Tibet during a particularly turbulent period, is similar in the universality of its message. This work, however, is unique in that it stresses compassion, impartiality, self-control, and virtue as essential for long-lasting success—whether as a leader or an individual trying to live a meaningful life. Mipham’s historic contribution to ethics and governance, until now little studied outside of Buddhist circles, teaches us the importance of protecting life, fair taxation, environmental sustainability, aiding the poor, and freedom of religion. Both present day leaders and those they lead will find this classic work, finally available in English, profoundly illuminating on political, societal, and personal levels.
Download or read book Family in Buddhism written by Liz Wilson and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging exploration of Buddhism and family in Asiafrom biological families to families created in monasteries. The Buddha left his home and family and enjoined his followers to go forth and become homeless. With a traditionally celibate clergy, Asian Buddhism is often regarded as a world-renouncing religion inimical to family life. This edited volume counters this view, showing how Asian Buddhists in a wide range of historical and geographical circumstances relate as kin to their biological families and to the religious families they join. Using contemporary and historical case studies as well as textual examples, contributors explore how Asian Buddhists invoke family ties in the intentional communities they create and use them to establish religious authority and guard religious privilege. The language of family and lineage emerges as central to a variety of South and East Asian Buddhist contexts. With an interdisciplinary, Pan-Asian approach, Family in Buddhism challenges received wisdom in religious studies and offers new ways to think about family and society.
Download or read book Nonsectarianism ris med in 19th and 20th Century Eastern Tibet written by Klaus-Dieter Mathes and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-09-13 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Groundbreaking research by nine international Tibetan studies scholars on one of the most important developments in the history of Tibetan Buddhism, ris med, a period of religious tolerance.
Download or read book Negotiating Rites written by Ute Hüsken and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ritual has been long viewed as an undisputed and indisputable part of (especially religious) tradition, performed over and over in the same ways: stable in form, meaningless, preconcieved, and with the aim of creating harmony and enabling a tradition's survival. The authors represented in this collection argue, however, that this view can be seriously challenged and that ritual's embeddedness in negotiation processes is one of its central features.
Download or read book A Buddhist Sensibility written by Dominique Townsend and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Founded in 1676 during a cosmopolitan early modern period, Mindröling monastery became a key site for Buddhist education and a Tibetan civilizational center. Its founders sought to systematize and institutionalize a worldview rooted in Buddhist philosophy, engaging with contemporaries from across Tibetan Buddhist schools while crystallizing what it meant to be part of their own Nyingma school. At the monastery, ritual performance, meditation, renunciation, and training in the skills of a bureaucrat or member of the literati went hand in hand. Studying at Mindröling entailed training the senses and cultivating the objects of the senses through poetry, ritual music, monastic dance, visual arts, and incense production, as well as medicine and astrology. Dominique Townsend investigates the ritual, artistic, and cultural practices inculcated at Mindröling to demonstrate how early modern Tibetans integrated Buddhist and worldly activities through training in aesthetics. Considering laypeople as well as monastics and women as well as men, A Buddhist Sensibility sheds new light on the forms of knowledge valued in early modern Tibetan societies, especially among the ruling classes. Townsend traces how tastes, values, and sensibilities were cultivated and spread, showing what it meant for a person, lay or monastic, to be deemed well educated. Combining historical and literary analysis with fieldwork in Tibetan Buddhist communities, this book reveals how monastic institutions work as centers of cultural production beyond the boundaries of what is conventionally deemed Buddhist.
Download or read book Tibet written by Sam Van Schaik and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-28 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a comprehensive history of the country, from its beginnings in the seventh century, to its rise as a Buddhist empire in medieval times, to its conquest by China in 1950, and subsequent rule by the Chinese.
Download or read book The Gathering of Intentions written by Jacob P. Dalton and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gathering of Intentions reads a single Tibetan Buddhist ritual system through the movements of Tibetan history, revealing the social and material dimensions of an ostensibly timeless tradition. By subjecting tantric practice to historical analysis, the book offers new insight into the origins of Tibetan Buddhism, the formation of its canons, the emergence of new lineages and ceremonies, and modern efforts to revitalize the religion by returning to its mythic origins. The ritual system explored in this volume is based on the Gathering of Intentions Sutra, the fundamental "root tantra" of the Anuyoga class of teachings belonging to the Nyingma ("Ancient") school of Tibetan Buddhism. Proceeding chronologically from the ninth century to the present, each chapter features a Tibetan author negotiating a perceived gap between the original root text—the Gathering of Intentions—and the lived religious or political concerns of his day. These ongoing tensions underscore the significance of Tibet's elaborate esoteric ritual systems, which have persisted for centuries, evolving in response to historical conditions. Rather than overlook practice in favor of philosophical concerns, this volume prioritizes Tibetan Buddhism's ritual systems for a richer portrait of the tradition.
Download or read book Pastures of Change written by Gillian G. Tan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-26 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a novel examination of socio-environmental change in a nomadic pastoralist area of the eastern Tibetan plateau. Drawing on long-term fieldwork that underscores an ethnography of local nomadic pastoralists, international development organisations, and Chinese government policies, the book argues that careful analysis and comparison of the different epistemologies and norms about "change" are vital to any critical appraisal of developments - often contested - on the grasslands of Eastern Tibet. Tibetan nomads have developed a way of life that is dependent in multiple ways on their animals and shaped by the phenomenological experience of mobility. These pastoralists have adapted to many changes in their social, political and environmental contexts over time. From the earliest historically recorded systems of segmentary lineage to the incorporation first into local fiefdoms and then into the Chinese state (of both Nationalist and Communist governments), Tibetan pastoralists have maintained their way of life, complemented by interactions with "the outside world". Rapid changes brought about by an intensification of interactions with the outside world call into question the sustained viability of a nomadic way of life, particularly as pastoralists themselves sell their herds and settle into towns. This book probes how we can more clearly understand these changes by looking specifically at one particular area of high-altitude grasslands in the Tibetan Plateau.
Download or read book The Concrete Plateau written by Andrew Grant and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Concrete Plateau, Andrew Grant examines the ways that urbanization has extended into the Tibetan Plateau. Many people still think of Tibetans as not being urban, or that if they do live in cities, this means that they have lost something. Much of this is relates to the expectation that urbanization can only erode essential aspects of Tibetan culture. Grant pushes back against this notion through his in-depth exploration of Tibetans' experiences with urban life in the growing city of Xining, the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau. Grant shows how Tibetans' actions to sustain their community challenge China's civilizing machine: a product of state-led urbanization that seeks to marginalize ethnic and indigenous groups. In their homes, neighborhoods, and businesses, Tibetans' assertion of cultural identity and modification of the built environment has prevented their assimilation into China's national urban project. The Concrete Plateau presents insights into the politics of urban development not only in Tibet and China, but to contexts of urban diversity all around world. Its findings are important for studies of urban development in the Global South where in-migrating ethnic and indigenous groups are negotiating top-down urban projects. Grant's book offers a profound rethinking of urbanization, rurality, culture, and the politics of place.
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 315 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 The Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism written by Dudjom and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-07-23 with total page 1346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a great modern Nyingma master, Dudjom Rinpoche's The Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism covers in detail and depth both the fundamental teachings and the history of Tibetan Buddhism's oldest school. This, the first English translation of His Holiness' masterwork, constitutes the most complete work of its type in the West. An absolute treasure for students of the tradition, it is also an indispensable reference for anyone with an interest in Buddhism. The book includes chronologies and glossaries that elucidate Buddhist doctrine, and it provides fascinating insights into the Buddhist history of Tibet. Two treatises form the present volume, namely the Fundamentals of the Nyingma School and the History of the Nyingma School. Among the most widely read of all His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche's works, these treatises were composed during the years immediately following his arrival in India as a refugee. His intention in writing them was to preserve the precise structure of the Nyingma philosophical view within its own historical and cultural context. This is the first time this text has been available in a trade edition. Beautifully presented, this single-volume edition represents a truly wonderful gift, and features illustrations in black and white and in color, plus maps, bibliographic information, and useful annotations.
Download or read book In the Shadow of the Buddha written by Matteo Pistono and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spiritual biography meets edge-of-your-seat undercover reporting: how an American Buddhist smuggled out hard evidence of abuse and torture in Tibet. For nearly a decade, Matteo Pistono smuggled out of Tibet evidence of atrocities by the Chinese government, showing it to the U.S. government, human rights organizations, and anyone who would listen. Yet Pistono did not originally intend to fight for social justice in Tibet-he had gone there as a Buddhist pilgrim. Disillusioned by a career in American politics, he had gone to the Himalayas looking for a simpler way of life. After encountering Buddhism in Nepal, Pistono's quest led him to Tibet and to a meditation master whose spiritual brother is Sogyal Rinpoche, bestselling author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Pistono not only became the master's student but also couriered messages to him in Tibet from the Dalai Lama in India. This began an extraordinary, and ultimately vital, adventure. In the Shadow of the Buddha is a book about Tibet through the eyes of a devotee-a stranger hiding in plain sight. It's about how a culture's rich spiritual past is slipping away against the force of a tyrannical future. It's about how Tibetans live today, and the tenacity of their faith in the future in spite of dire repression and abuse. It's also about Pistono's own journey from being a frustrated political activist to becoming a practicing Buddhist mystic, a man who traveled thousands of miles and risked his own life to pursue freedom and peace. Watch a Video
Download or read book Dign ga s Investigation of the Percept written by Douglas S. Duckworth and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dignāga's Investigation of the Percept is the first comprehensive study of a text and its history in Buddhist studies, from ancient India to the present day and across a range of countries and languages. The volume editors translate and study an influential epistemological work and its commentarial trajectory.
