Founded in 1676 during a cosmopolitan early modern period, Mindroling 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 Mindroling 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 Mindroling 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.
A Buddhist Sensibility: Aesthetic Education at Tibet's Mindroling Monastery, Dominique Townsend, Columbia University Press, Paperback, 272 pp, $30.00
Dominique Townsend is assistant professor of Buddhist studies at Bard College. She is also a poet and the author of Shantideva: How to Wake Up a Hero (2015), a book about Buddhism for children and families.
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CONTENTS: A Buddhist Sensibility
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List of Illustrations
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vii
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Acknowledgments
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ix
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A Note on Translations and Transliterations
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xiii
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Introduction: Buddhist Aesthetics, the Cultivation of the Senses, and Beauty's Efficacy
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1
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ONE
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Historical Background: Laying the Foundation for Mindroling
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26
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TWO
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A Pleasure Grove for Buddhist Senses: Mindroling Takes Root
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53
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THREE
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Plucking the Strings: On Style, Letter Writing, and Relationships
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86
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FOUR
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Training the Senses: Aesthetic Education for Monastics
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121
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FIVE
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Taming the Aristocrats: Cultivating Early Modern Tibetan Literati and Bureaucrats
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145
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Epilogue: Destruction and Revival: The Next Generation
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177
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Abbreviations
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193
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Notes
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195
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Bibliography
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227
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Index
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243
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