Our next seminar will be at 6:00-7:30pm on Wednesday September 23 in lecture room 109 of the RD Watt Building, University of Sydney. Please note that this is not the usual venue. We hope you can attend. Kind regards, AABS Executive Nested autobiography: Life writing within Taranatha's larger works The Tibetan scholar Taranatha (1575-1634) wrote a 1,000 page autobiography a short while before his passing. Such a large work about oneself might at first appear as a rather immodest undertaking. By far the largest portion of the text is devoted to Taranatha establishing himself as the pre-eminent authority on Indian Buddhism of his time as well as recording the minute details of his political relationships with his patrons. However in the mid point there is a tiny separate section of 15 verses which he refers to as his true and authentic autobiography. This presentation will examine this tiny text and locate it within Tibetan Buddhist literature and within the broader events of Taranatha's life. David Templeman first met Tibetans in 1967 and worked with them between 1969 and 1972. Since then he has been interested in the writings of Taranatha and has published several translations of his historical works. David has nearly completed translating Taranatha's large autobiography. Recently, he has published (with John Powers) A Historical Dictionary of Tibet (2012) and (with A. Di Castro) Asian Horizons: Giuseppe Tucci's Buddhist, Indian, Himalayan and Central Asian Studies (2015). David is currently Adjunct Research Fellow at Monash Asia Institute, Monash University.