Table of Contents
- NEW BOOK> Love Letters from Golok: A Tantric Couple in Modern Tibet
- TOC> Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, Vol. 11
NEW BOOK> Love Letters from Golok: A Tantric Couple in Modern Tibet
by Holly Gayley
Dear Colleagues,I am pleased to announce that my book, Love Letters from Golok: A Tantric Couple in Modern Tibet, has just been published by Columbia University Press.
With a focus on Buddhist conceptions of gender, agency and healing, Love Letters from Golok examines the lives and letters of a contemporary Buddhist tantric couple, Khandro Tāre Lhamo (1938-2002) and Namtrul Rinpoche (1944-2011), who played a significant role in revitalizing Buddhism during the post-Mao era in the Tibetan region of Golok. Exploring their epistolary courtship and shared religious career, the book recovers Tibetan voices in representing their own modern history under Chinese rule and contributes to burgeoning scholarly literature on Buddhist women, minorities in China, and studies of collective trauma.
For those in the US and Canada, you can receive a 30% discount by using the promo code "GOLOK" on the CUP website: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/love-letters-from-golok/9780231180528.
Thank you for your kind attention,
Holly Gayley
Assistant Professor
University of Colorado Boulder
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Love Letters from Golok chronicles the courtship between two Buddhist tantric masters, Tāre Lhamo (1938–2002) and Namtrul Rinpoche (1944–2011), and their endeavor to reinvigorate Buddhism in eastern Tibet during the post-Mao era. In fifty-six letters exchanged from 1978 to 1980, Tāre Lhamo and Namtrul Rinpoche envisioned a shared destiny to "heal the damage" done to Buddhism during the years leading up to and including the Cultural Revolution. Holly Gayley retrieves the personal and prophetic dimensions of their courtship and its consummation in a twenty-year religious career that informs issues of gender and agency in Buddhism, cultural preservation among Tibetan communities, and alternative histories for minorities in China.
The correspondence between Tāre Lhamo and Namtrul Rinpoche is the first collection of "love letters" to come to light in Tibetan literature. Blending tantric imagery with poetic and folk song styles, their letters have a fresh vernacular tone comparable to the love songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama, but with an eastern Tibetan flavor. Gayley reads these letters against hagiographic writings about the couple, supplemented by field research, to illuminate representational strategies that serve to narrate cultural trauma in a redemptive key, quite unlike Chinese scar literature or the testimonials of exile Tibetans. With special attention to Tāre Lhamo's role as a tantric heroine and her hagiographic fusion with Namtrul Rinpoche, Gayley vividly shows how Buddhist masters have adapted Tibetan literary genres to share private intimacies and address contemporary social concerns.
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/love-letters-from-golok/9780231180528
TOC> Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, Vol. 11
by Steven Egan
The Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies (A
Recognised Independent Centre of the University of Oxford) announces the
publication of Volume 11 of its Journal. Please find the Table of
Contents below. For further enquiries please go to www.jocbs.org, or email steven.egan@ocbs.org.
Table of
Contents - JOCBS (Vol 11)
Editorial.
Richard Gombrich 8
The Vessantara-Jātaka
and Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya Narrative. Bhikkhu Anālayo 11
A Brief Criticism
of the ‘Two Paths to Liberation’ Theory. Bhikkhu Anālayo 38
The Bhikkhunī
Revival Debate and Identity Problems: An Ethnographic
Inquiry. Gihani De Silva 52
‘That bhikkhu lets
go both the near and far shores’: meaning and metaphor in the
refrain from the uraga verses. Dhivan Thomas Jones 71
A Note on Refuge
in Vedic and Pāli Texts. Brett Shults 108
Ethnic Buddhist
Temples and the Korean Diaspora in Japan. Tadaatsu Tajima 132
The Emperor's New
Clothes: The Buddhist Military Chaplaincy in Imperial Japan and Contemporary
America. Brian Victoria 155
Book
Reviews
Joanna Jurewicz, Fire
and Cognition in the Ṛgveda. Reviewed by László Fórizs 201
Yuke Sirimane, Entering
the Stream to Enlightenment: Experiences of the Stages of the Buddhist Path in
Contemporary Sri Lanka. Reviewed by Mark Leonard 227
Chen-kuo Lin and
Michael Radich, A Distant Mirror: Articulating Indic Ideas in Sixth and
Seventh Century Chinese Buddhism. Reviewed by Rafal Stepien
237
