Download or read book The Book of Tibetan Elders written by Sandy Johnson and published by Riverhead Books (Hardcover). This book was released on 1996 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A historically isolated people, the Tibetans have now indeed come to the land of the red man, and nearly every other country on earth. When the Chinese invaded the country in 1959 and proceeded to destroy the ancient-wisdom culture as well as nearly a sixth of the population, hundreds of thousands of Tibetans fled to India and parts west. In the 1980s, the prophecy was fulfilled, and the Dalai Lama, exiled leader of Tibet, met with Hopi and other American Indian elders in an effort to reunite the brothers." "Tibet's spiritual elders are dying off, and it is with them that so many of the secrets of survival lie. They are the ones who can find by touching someone's wrist what our medicine cannot detect; they saw the empty spaces of the atom before science considered the concept of subatomic particles; they know how to realign even severe emotional imbalances without drugs or therapy; they know what plants heal us (they have catalogued more than two thousand) and how to save them from destruction; they predicted the demise of their own country at the hands of the Chinese; they saw the coming of AIDS almost ten centuries ago. These people are dying off, and with them, the wisdom we need to make it through the next century and beyond." "After the Chinese occupation of their country, many Tibetan elders were killed in reeducation camps. Many survived, however, to escape what has now become a brutally oppressive environment. Sandy Johnson traveled around the world gathering the life stories and teachings of Tibetan doctors, the state oracle, the previous Dalai Lama's tailor, the great women masters - the entire range of the culture. An astrologer offers to produce Sandy's chart, including the date of her death; a stone carver shows her the rocks with prayers painted on them that he places in the river at the end of every day so that the water may carry blessings to everything it touches; Johnson meets a woman of indeterminate age who lives her life in a cave praying that people might be less distracted by material things and learn to care for each other again. At the same time, Johnson herself is on a spiritual quest, and interwoven with the stories of the elders comes her own physical healing as well as a long-awaited reconciliation with her family. The book is filled with predictions made by the Tibetan elders about the course of Johnson's life - most of which have already come true."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book The Tibetans written by Matthew T. Kapstein and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-06-05 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a clear and comprehensive introduction to Tibet, its culture and history. A clear and comprehensive overview of Tibet, its culture and history. Responds to current interest in Tibet due to continuing publicity about Chinese rule and growing interest in Tibetan Buddhism. Explains recent events within the context of Tibetan history. Situates Tibet in relation to other Asian civilizations through the ages. Draws on the most recent scholarly and archaeological research. Introduces Tibetan culture – particularly social institutions, religious and political traditions, the arts and medical lore. An epilogue considers the fragile position of Tibetan civilization in the modern world.

Download or read book When the Iron Bird Flies written by Jianglin Li and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An untold story that reshapes our understanding of Chinese and Tibetan history From 1956 to 1962, devastating military conflicts took place in China's southwestern and northwestern regions. Official record at the time scarcely made mention of the campaign, and in the years since only lukewarm acknowledgment of the violence has surfaced. When the Iron Bird Flies, by Jianglin Li, breaks this decades long silence to reveal for the first time a comprehensive and explosive picture of the six years that would prove definitive in modern Tibetan and Chinese history. The CCP referred to the campaign as "suppressing the Tibetan rebellion." It would lead to the 14th Dalai Lama's exile in India, as well as the Tibetan diaspora in 1959, though the battles lasted three additional years after these events. Featuring key figures in modern Chinese history, the battles waged in this period covered a vast geographical region. This book offers a portrait of chaos, deception, heroism, and massive loss. Beyond the significant death toll across the Tibetan regions, the war also destroyed most Tibetan monasteries in a concerted effort to eradicate local religion and scholarship. Despite being considered a military success, to this day, the operations in the agricultural regions remain unknown. As large numbers of Tibetans have self-immolated in recent years to protest Chinese occupation, Li shows that the largest number of cases occurred in the sites most heavily affected by this hidden war. She argues persuasively that the events described in this book will shed more light on our current moment, and will help us understand the unrelenting struggle of the Tibetan people for their freedom.

Download or read book Taming Tibet written by Emily Yeh and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The violent protests in Lhasa in 2008 against Chinese rule were met by disbelief and anger on the part of Chinese citizens and state authorities, perplexed by Tibetans' apparent ingratitude for the generous provision of development. In Taming Tibet, Emily T. Yeh examines how Chinese development projects in Tibet served to consolidate state space and power. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2000 and 2009, Yeh traces how the transformation of the material landscape of Tibet between the 1950s and the first decade of the twenty-first century has often been enacted through the labor of Tibetans themselves. Focusing on Lhasa, Yeh shows how attempts to foster and improve Tibetan livelihoods through the expansion of markets and the subsidized building of new houses, the control over movement and space, and the education of Tibetan desires for development have worked together at different times and how they are experienced in everyday life.The master narrative of the PRC stresses generosity: the state and Han migrants selflessly provide development to the supposedly backward Tibetans, raising the living standards of the Han's "little brothers." Arguing that development is in this context a form of "indebtedness engineering," Yeh depicts development as a hegemonic project that simultaneously recruits Tibetans to participate in their own marginalization while entrapping them in gratitude to the Chinese state. The resulting transformations of the material landscape advance the project of state territorialization. Exploring the complexity of the Tibetan response to—and negotiations with—development, Taming Tibet focuses on three key aspects of China's modernization: agrarian change, Chinese migration, and urbanization. Yeh presents a wealth of ethnographic data and suggests fresh approaches that illuminate the Tibet Question.

Download or read book On the Margins of Tibet written by Ashild Kolas and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The state of Tibetan culture within contemporary China is a highly politicized topic on which reliable information is rare. Based on fieldwork and interviews conducted between 1998 and 2000 in China's Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures, this book investigates the present conditions of Tibetan cultural life and cultural expression.

Download or read book The Tibetan Book Of Living And Dying written by Sogyal Rinpoche and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 25th Anniversary Edition Over 3 Million Copies Sold 'I couldn't give this book a higher recommendation' BILLY CONNOLLY Written by the Buddhist meditation master and popular international speaker Sogyal Rinpoche, this highly acclaimed book clarifies the majestic vision of life and death that underlies the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. It includes not only a lucid, inspiring and complete introduction to the practice of meditation, but also advice on how to care for the dying with love and compassion, and how to bring them help of a spiritual kind. But there is much more besides in this classic work, which was written to inspire all who read it to begin the journey to enlightenment and so become 'servants of peace'.

Download or read book Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet written by Melvyn C. Goldstein and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, the People's Republic of China gradually permitted the renewal of religious activity. Tibetans, whose traditional religious and cultural institutions had been decimated during the preceding two decades, took advantage of the decisions of 1978 to begin a Buddhist renewal that is one of the most extensive and dramatic examples of religious revitalization in contemporary China. The nature of that revival is the focus of this book. Four leading specialists in Tibetan anthropology and religion conducted case studies in the Tibet autonomous region and among the Tibetans of Sichuan and Qinghai provinces. There they observed the revival of the Buddhist heritage in monastic communities and among laypersons at popular pilgrimages and festivals. Demonstrating how that revival must contend with tensions between the Chinese state and aspirations for greater Tibetan autonomy, the authors discuss ways that Tibetan Buddhists are restructuring their religion through a complex process of social, political, and economic adaptation. Buddhism has long been the main source of Tibetans' pride in their culture and country. These essays reveal the vibrancy of that ancient religion in contemporary Tibet and also the problems that religion and Tibetan culture in general are facing in a radically altered world.

Download or read book The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier written by Benno Weiner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-15 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, Benno Weiner provides the first in-depth study of an ethnic minority region during the first decade of the People's Republic of China: the Amdo region in the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Employing previously inaccessible local archives as well as other rare primary sources, he demonstrates that the Communist Party's goal in 1950s Amdo was not just state-building but also nation-building. Such an objective required the construction of narratives and policies capable of convincing Tibetans of their membership in a wider political community. As Weiner shows, however, early efforts to gradually and organically transform a vast multiethnic empire into a singular nation-state lost out to a revolutionary impatience, demanding more immediate paths to national integration and socialist transformation. This led in 1958 to communization, then to large-scale rebellion and its brutal pacification. Rather than joining voluntarily, Amdo was integrated through the widespread, often indiscriminate use of violence, a violence that lingers in the living memory of Amdo Tibetans and others.

Download or read book Eat the Buddha written by Barbara Demick and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping portrait of modern Tibet told through the lives of its people, from the bestselling author of Nothing to Envy “A brilliantly reported and eye-opening work of narrative nonfiction.”—The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Parul Sehgal, The New York Times • The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • NPR • The Economist • Outside • Foreign Affairs Just as she did with North Korea, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick explores one of the most hidden corners of the world. She tells the story of a Tibetan town perched eleven thousand feet above sea level that is one of the most difficult places in all of China for foreigners to visit. Ngaba was one of the first places where the Tibetans and the Chinese Communists encountered one another. In the 1930s, Mao Zedong’s Red Army fled into the Tibetan plateau to escape their adversaries in the Chinese Civil War. By the time the soldiers reached Ngaba, they were so hungry that they looted monasteries and ate religious statues made of flour and butter—to Tibetans, it was as if they were eating the Buddha. Their experiences would make Ngaba one of the engines of Tibetan resistance for decades to come, culminating in shocking acts of self-immolation. Eat the Buddha spans decades of modern Tibetan and Chinese history, as told through the private lives of Demick’s subjects, among them a princess whose family is wiped out during the Cultural Revolution, a young Tibetan nomad who becomes radicalized in the storied monastery of Kirti, an upwardly mobile entrepreneur who falls in love with a Chinese woman, a poet and intellectual who risks everything to voice his resistance, and a Tibetan schoolgirl forced to choose at an early age between her family and the elusive lure of Chinese money. All of them face the same dilemma: Do they resist the Chinese, or do they join them? Do they adhere to Buddhist teachings of compassion and nonviolence, or do they fight? Illuminating a culture that has long been romanticized by Westerners as deeply spiritual and peaceful, Demick reveals what it is really like to be a Tibetan in the twenty-first century, trying to preserve one’s culture, faith, and language against the depredations of a seemingly unstoppable, technologically all-seeing superpower. Her depiction is nuanced, unvarnished, and at times shocking.

Download or read book The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia written by Christopher I. Beckwith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This narrative history of the Tibetan Empire in Central Asia from about A.D. 600 to 866 depicts the struggles of the great Tibetan, Turkic, Arab, and Chinese powers for dominance over the Silk Road lands that connected Europe and East Asia. It shows the importance of overland contacts between East and West in the Early Middle Ages and elucidates Tibet's role in the conflict over Central Asia.

Download or read book The Disempowered Development of Tibet in China written by Andrew Martin Fischer and published by Studies in Modern Tibetan Culture. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the synergy between development and conflict in the Tibetan areas of Western China from the mid-1990s onward, when rapid economic growth occurred alongside a particularly assimilationist policy approach. Based on accessible economic analysis and extensive in...

Download or read book Tibet s Last Stand written by Warren W. Smith and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a definitive account of the origins and events of the 2008 Tibetan uprising, which began with peaceful demonstrations by monks of Lhasa's great monasteries on the anniversary of the 1959 revolt. Noted expert Warren W. Smith Jr. argues that the uprising was a widespread response to the conditions of Chinese rule over Tibet, which revealed much about Tibetan nationalism and even more about Chinese nationalism. Interpreting the Tibetan uprising as an attempt to spoil the Beijing Olympics, China's hard-line response was repression, "patriotic education," and propaganda blaming the disturbances on the "Dalai clique" and "hostile Western forces." Smith contends that China's offensive is based upon a belief that China now has sufficient economic and political influence to make the world "thoroughly revise its mistaken knowledge" about the Tibet issue. He convincingly shows that far from becoming more lenient in response to Tibetan discontent, China has determined to eradicate Tibetan opposition internally and coerce the international community to conform to China's version of Tibetan history and reality.

Download or read book Sources of Tibetan Tradition written by Kurtis R. Schaeffer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 854 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive collection of classic Tibetan works in any Western language.

Download or read book The Tibetan Book of the Dead written by Padmasambhava and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Awakening Upon Dying, with introductory commentary by Dzogchen Buddhist master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, is a new translation of the ancient text also known as The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State. Both a practical guide and intriguing historical, cultural, and spiritual document, this new version incorporates recent discoveries that have allowed for a better translation of previously ambiguous passages. Revealing a set of instructions designed to facilitate the inner liberation of the dead or dying person, the book provides a guide to navigating the bardo--the interval between death and rebirth. Originally composed by Padmasambhava, an important Indian master of the eighth century, the Tibetan Book of the Dead was concealed in Tibet until it was discovered in the fourteenth century by Karma Lingpa, a famous Tibetan tertön (discoverer of ancient texts). Describing in detail the characteristics and fantastic visions of each stage beyond death, the book includes invocations to be read aloud to the dying person, to help his or her successful journey toward the stage of liberation. Chögyal Namkhai Norbu's introduction clarifies the texts from the Dzogchen point of view and provides a scholarly summary of the ancient material based on his oral teachings and written works. In addition, material from several of Namkhai Norbu's more recent written works and oral teachers have been added, including an essay on the four intermediate states after death entitled Birth, Life, and Death. A full-color 16-page insert of traditional Tibetan art highlights Tibet's unique aesthetic wisdom.

Download or read book Tibetans in Nepal written by Ann Frechette and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on eighteen months of field research conducted in exile carpet factories, settlement camps, monasteries, and schools in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal, as well as in Dharamsala, India and Lhasa, Tibet, this book offers an important contribution to the debate on the impact of international assistance on migrant communities. The author explores the ways in which Tibetan exiles in Nepal negotiate their norms and values as they interact with the many international organizations that assist them, and comes to the conclusion that, as beneficial as aid agency assistance often is, it also complicates the Tibetans' efforts to define themselves as a community.

Download or read book God Spoke Tibetan written by Allan Maberly and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Tibetan History Reader written by Gray Tuttle and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 750 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Answering a critical need for an accurate, in-depth history of Tibet, this single-volume resource reproduces essential, hard-to-find essays from the past fifty years of Tibetan studies. Covering the social, cultural, and political development of Tibet from the seventh century to the modern period, the volume is organized chronologically and regionally to complement courses in Asian and religious studies and world civilizations. Beginning with Tibet's emergence as a regional power and concluding with its profound contemporary transformations, this anthology offers both a general and ..