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 ..
The Tibetan language comprises a wide range of spoken and written varieties whose known history dates from the 7th century AD to the present day. Its speakers inhabit a vast area in Central Asia and the Himalayas extending into seven modern nation states, while its abundant literature includes much of vital importance to the study of Buddhism. After surveying all the known varieties of Tibetan, including their geographical and historical background, this book concentrates on a phonological and grammatical description of the modern spoken Lhasa dialect, the standard spoken variety. The grammatical framework which has been specially devised to describe this variety is then applied to the written varieties of Preclassical and Classical Tibetan, demonstrating the fundamental unity of the language. The writing system is outlined, though all examples and texts are given in roman script and where appropriate, the International Phonetic Alphabet. The volume includes a comprehensive bibliography.
This book provides a detailed account of the structure and political strategies of the Tibetan government-in exile, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), in northern India. Since its founding in 1959, it has been led by the 14th Dalai Lama who struggles to regain the Tibetan homeland. Based on a theoretical approach on exile organizations – and extensive empirical studies in Asia – this book discusses CTA’s political strategies to gain national loyalty, and international support, in order to secure its own organizational survival and the ultimate goal: the return to Tibet. The book is organized around the two fundamental questions: firstly, how the CTA fosters its claims to be the sole representative of all Tibetans over the last decades in exile; and, secondly, which policies have been carried out in order to regain the homeland. The book is divided into four substantial chapters: the historical background, providing a review of pre-1959 political Tibet a theoretical section which covers the critical position of exile organizations an examination of the exile Tibetan community and government from the early years an analysis of crucial CTA policies. Innovative and unique, this book combines a political science approach with Tibetan studies to analyse exile-Tibetan politics in particular, and exile governments in general.
"The story of Drikung Chetsang Rinpoche’s life," notes the Dalai Lama, "encompasses a remarkably broad range of Tibetan experience over the past fifty years." This is the story of a young boy, born in 1946 to inherit the role of high-ranking lama. When the Chinese army invaded, his family escaped the country, but he and the other monks in his monastery were rounded up by soldiers and sent to an indoctrination school. After surviving almost two decades of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet, during which time lamas and aristocrats were persecuted and jailed, Chetsang Rinpoche walked out of Tibet alone and found his way to Kathmandu, Nepal. Eventually, after living as a refugee and an immigrant, he fully took on leadership of the Drikung lineage by founding the Drikung Kagyu Institute in India. Since then the teachings of this lineage have spread around the world after nearly being lost.
The focus of the study is the Tibetan and Tibetanized border populations in the little known Himalayan high-valley of Nyishang in West Central Nepal close to the Tibetan border. There, a group of traders have greatly extended their external relations over the past century in the form of long-distance trade ventures, thereby thoroughly changing the internal conditions of socio-economic organizations in their home district. The object of the study is to establish whether larger geohistorical processes of structural change may be conceptualized in such a way as to link structuration at the level of the localized social group to the dynamics of the wider regional setting.
In the past century, the Western view of Tibet has evolved from an exotic Shangri-la filled with golden idols and the promise of immortality, to a peaceful land with an enlightened society now ravaged by outside aggression. How and why did our perception change? How accurate are our modern conceptions of Tibet? Imagining Tibet is a collection of essays that reveal these Western conceptions. Providing an historical background to the West's ever-changing relationship with Tibet, Donald Lopez, Jeffrey Hopkins, Jamyang Norbu, and other noted scholars explore a variety of topics - from Western perceptions of Tibetan approaches to violence, monastic life, and life as a nation in exile, to representations of Tibet in Western literature, art, environmentalism, and the New Age movement.
Over the past nine years the Orient Foundation has compiled a database that brings together information on over 600 Tibetan-related organizations throughtout the world. Compiled under the auspices of HH The Dalai Lama, this book provided comprehensive information about Tibetan Buddhism and culture for the general public including: Museums, teaching centres, retreat centres and publications listed in a country-by-country gazetteer. Background information on the four schools of Tibetan Biddhism Biographies of practising Tibetan teachers The First glossary of Tibetan terms
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.
