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The Sixteenth Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, was the first Tibetan Buddhist leader to make extensive teaching tours to the West. His three tours to Europe and North America from 1974 to 1980 led to the global expansion of Tibetan Buddhist schools. This book presents the most in-depth analysis of the Karmapa’s contribution to the preservation and transmission of Tibetan Buddhism in exile. It is the first study to combine Tibetan life-writing and biographical materials in English with a thorough examination of the transformation of Tibetan Buddhism in the modern era of globalization. Drawing on a wide range of data from written accounts, collections of photographs, recordings of interviews, ...
Conflicting Memories is a study of how the Tibetan encounter with the Chinese state during the Maoist era has been recalled and reimagined by Chinese and Tibetan authors and artists since the late 1970s. Written by a team of historians, anthropologists, and scholars of religion, literature and culture, it examines official histories, biographies, memoirs, and films as well as oral testimonies, fiction, and writings by Buddhist adepts. The book includes translated extracts from key interviews, speeches, literature, and filmscripts. Conflicting Memories explores what these revised versions of the past chose as their focus, which types of people produced them, and what aims they pursued in the ...
The papers in Tibetan Literary Genres, Texts, and Text Types deepen our knowledge of Tibetan literature. They not only examine particular Tibetan genres and texts (pre-modern and contemporary), but also genre classification, transformation, and reception. Despite previous contributions, the systematic analysis of Tibetan textual genres is still a relatively undeveloped field, especially when compared with the sophisticated examinations of other literary traditions. The book is divided into four parts: textual typologies, blurred genre boundaries, specific texts and text types, and genres in transition to modernity. The introduction discusses previous classificatory approaches and concepts of textual linguistics. The text classes that receive individual attention can be summarised as songs and poetry, offering-ritual, hagiography, encyclopaedia, lexicographical texts, trickster narratives, and modern literature. Contributors include: Franz-Karl Ehrhard, Ruth Gamble, Lama Jabb, Roger R. Jackson, Giacomella Orofino, Jim Rheingans, Peter Schwieger, Ekaterina Sobkovyak, Victoria Sujata, and Peter Verhagen.
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 reima...
Tibetan Buddhism teaches compassion toward all beings, a category that explicitly includes animals. Slaughtering animals is morally problematic at best and, at worst, completely incompatible with a religious lifestyle. Yet historically most Tibetans—both monastic and lay—have made meat a regular part of their diet. In this study of the place of vegetarianism within Tibetan religiosity, Geoffrey Barstow explores the tension between Buddhist ethics and Tibetan cultural norms to offer a novel perspective on the spiritual and social dimensions of meat eating. Food of Sinful Demons shows the centrality of vegetarianism to the cultural history of Tibet through specific ways in which nonreligio...
In this volume, we try to understand the "Mamluk Empire" not as a confined space but as a region where several nodes of different networks existed side-by-side and at the same time. In our opinion, these networks constitute to a great extent the core of the so-called Mamluk society; they form the basis of the social order. Following, in part, concepts refined in the New Area Studies, recent reflections about the phenomenon of the "Empire - State", trajectories in today's Global History, and the spatial turn in modern historiography, we intend to identify a number of physical and cognitive networks with one or more nodes in Mamluk-controlled territories. In addition to this, one of the most important analytical questions would be to define the role of these networks in Mamluk society.
The Festschrift celebrates Franz-Karl Ehrhard, Professor of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 2003 to 2019. Offered on the occasion of his 65th birthday, it comprises 26 papers by friends and colleagues to honour his outstanding and far-reaching contributions to the field of Tibetan Studies. Mirroring Franz-Karl Ehrhard's research interests, the papers centre on the religious and literary traditions of Tibet and the Himalayas, including sacred geography, religious history, philosophy, and studies in textual production and transmission.
This book focuses on varied forms of self-referential storytelling or life writing and its emergence as a democratic and inclusive genre, both globally and in India, and its intersections with history, fiction, memory, truth and identity. The book examines the practice of life writing and its scope for accommodating diverse voices, distinct identities, collaborations and non-hierarchical connections as it gives voice to oral, silenced and marginalized communities. It explores forms like auto/biographical fiction, digital storytelling, graphic memoirs, and testimonies of migration and exile, among others. The eclectic collection of essays in this volume draws attention towards the transformat...
The Power of Publishing in Early Modern Tibetan Buddhism explores the historical and religious dynamics that led to the “golden age” of Tibetan printing in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Tibetan woodblock publishing reached its zenith. By tracing the publication and circulation of Tibetan books in early modern Asia, from the Fifth Dalai Lama's Potala Palace in Lhasa, through cosmopolitan Qing Beijing, and into monastic colleges on the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, this book demonstrates how woodblock publishing helped shape the religious and political landscapes of Tibet, Mongolia, and China into the twentieth century. Intertwined with this larger historical narrative, this volume explores the meaning and purpose of books in early modern Tibetan Buddhist cultures, especially the role of Mahāyāna Buddhist ideas as a driving force behind both the growth of woodblock publishing at that time and the use of Tibetan Buddhist books for a variety of activities, including scholarship, exchange, ritual, and a wide range of reading practices.
Storytelling in late antique Christianity -- "How is Muhammad a better storyteller than I?" -- Narrating the Quran with Christian saints -- Christian saints in Islamic literature -- From Paul and John to Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ -- Stories between Christianity and Islam.