Dear members,

Our next seminar will be at 6:00-7:30pm on Thursday August 18 in the Rogers Room (N397) of the John Woolley Building, University of Sydney.

We hope you can attend this event.

Kind regards,
AABS Executive


How Kailas became a sacred Buddhist mountain

The transformation of an earthly mountain from a secular to a sacred space in Buddhist understanding is a historical process. Mount Kailas (Tib: Ti-se), situated in the southwestern corner of the Tibetan plateau, is renowned as a sacred site in both Buddhist and Hindu traditions. While there are references to a heavenly Mount Kelasa in the early (mid first millennium CE) texts of Pali Buddhism, the earthly Kailas was transformed into sacred space by hierarchs of the Kargyu sect of Tibetan Buddhism in the 12th/13th centuries and this paper will discuss the process by which it became "Buddhacised" in the Tibetan cultural world.

Alex McKay has a BA (Hons) in Religious Studies and History and a Ph.D in South Asian History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (London University). A former research fellow and lecturer at SOAS and the International Institute for Asian Studies (Leiden) he is now retired and holds an Honorary Associate Professorship at ANU. His most recent publication is Kailas Histories: Renunciate traditions and the construction of Himalayan sacred geography (Brill, 2015).
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