Taught by Professor Janet Gyatso
This course will study the variety of Buddhisms in Tibet, along with their connection to indigenous religions on the plateau. We will take up this vast topic through four main lenses. One will be facilitated by reading autobiographies and biographies of individual lives, written by women and men from various social positions and historical contexts, to study how ritual practices and philosophical doctrines impact human relations, especially teacher-student and lay-monastic, in Tibetan Buddhist worlds. The autobiographers range from the current Dalai Lama to an impoverished 17th-century hermitess, a cave-dwelling visionary, a powerful aristocrat, a philosopher-monk, and others. Secondly, we will have the good fortune to have a visiting lecturer for 3 classes, Dr. Tashi Dekyi, originally from Khams, who studies indigenous values and the ways in which the land itself is an agent in moral person-building in Tibet. This perspective will shape how we study all our readings this semester. Thirdly, the course as a whole will take an eco-feminist perspective on the range of Buddhisms in Tibet, including an introductory study of tantric Buddhism, in anticipation of another course, on Buddhist tantra, to be taught in fall 2025. And finally, we will pay attention throughout to religio-medical understandings of the human body in Tibetan Buddhism, including yogic practices and death practices. No previous background in Buddhism is required; both advanced and introductory students will be accommodated.
Image Gallery
Some Images from the class
Partial Reading List
Dalai Lama XIV, My Land and My People
Tsangnyon Heruka, The Life of Milarepa, trans. Andy Quintman. Penguin edition
Keith Dowman, trans, Sky Dancer: The Secret Life and Songs of the Lady Yeshe Tsogyel
Sarah Jacoby, Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist
Visionary Sera Khandro
