Tibetan and Himalayan Library - THL

Description: Publisher’s Description: This volume focuses upon the relationships between the past and the present evoked in Tibetan historiography, ritual literature, and Buddhist esoteric writings. It offers diverse perspectives on a critical period in Tibet’s history when Tibetans found themselves caught up in the tides of political turmoil and forced into the center of a much larger Central Eurasian struggle for power and territorial control between the Manchu rulers of the Qing empire and the Mongols of the north. The volume highlights the various ways Tibetan historians, biographers, and Buddhist scholars during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries succeeded in the task of reinventing and reinforcing their respective traditions.

Table of Contents: Introduction / Bryan J. Cuevas and Kurtis R. Schaeffer -- Royal Blood and Political Power: Contrasting Allegiances in the Memoirs of Yol mo Bstan ’dzin nor bu (1598-1644) / Benjamin Bogin -- Imperial Stooge or Emissary to the Dge lugs Throne? Rethinking the Biographies of the Chankya Rolpé Dorjé / Marina Illich -- Ippolito Desideri, S.J. on Padmasambhava’s Prophecies and the Persecution of the Rnying ma, 1717-1720 / R. Trent Pomplun -- Dge lugs pa Divided: Some Aspects of the Political Role of Tibetan Buddhism in the Expansion of the Qing Dynasty / Nikolay Tsyrempilov -- A Tibetan Buddhist Mission to the East: The Fifth Dalai Lama’s Journey to Beijing, 1652-1653 / Gray Tuttle -- Recreating the Rnying ma School: The Mdo dbang Tradition of Smin grol gling / Jake Dalton -- Pure-Lands and other Visions in Seventeenth-Century Tibet: A Gnam chos sādhana for the Pure-land Sukhāvatī Revealed in 1658 by Gnam chos Mi ’gyur rdo rje (1645-1667) / Georgios Halkias -- The Lives and Time of ’Jam dbyangs bzhad pa / Derek Maher -- A Mahāyānist Rewriting of the History of China by Mgon po skyabs in the Rgya nag chos ’byung / Guilaine Mala -- Bdud 'dul rdo rje (1615-1672) and Rnying ma Adaptations to the Era of the Fifth Dalai Lama / Jann Ronis -- Ritual, Festival, and Authority under the Fifth Dalai Lama / Kurtis R. Schaeffer -- Ban de skya min ser min: Tshangs dbyangs rgya mtsho’s Complex, Confused, and Confusing Relationship with Sde srid Sangs rgyas rgya mtsho as Portrayed in the Tshangs dbyangs rgya mtsho’i mgul glu / Simon Wikham-Smith -- Contributors.