PROJECTS
SCHOLARS SEMINARS
The Scholars Seminars, jointly convened by the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, meet biweekly in the Rubin Foundation seminar room. The seminars, which began in 2006, alternate between presentations of work and reading Tibetan literature. The seminars are offered as a support to scholars in the New York region. They exist to provide a friendly community of scholars working in the field and an informal forum for presentation and discussion of works in progress. The Tibetan reading seminars are intended to broaden community members' exposure to the immense diversity of Tibetan language literature. They are led by a single scholar who reads the text as participating members follow along. Knowledge of literary Tibetan is required.
The seminars are part of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation's strong commitment to scholarship on the Himalaya, and reflect its work in creating a vibrant community of scholars and educators centered around the Rubin Museum of Art.
The seminars are open to all scholars of Tibet and the Himalaya with an affiliation with a research institution, museum, library, or university, and to independent scholars by invitation. Please contact Alex Gardner at the Rubin Foundation for more information.
November 8, 2006: Planning session, followed by group attendance at the book launch of Matthew Kapstein's The Tibetans at the RMA.
November 29, 2006: Tibetan Literature Jann Ronis, one of TBRC's 2006-2007 scholars in residence and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia, led the reading of an extract from Si tu pan chen chos kyi byung ngas's autobiography, a section in which he encounters the Dalai Lama VII on his return from exile.
December 13, 2006: Scholarship We read and discussed excerpts from Davidson's Tibetan Renaissance. Following this meeting the group decided to focus on presentations by scholars in the community, rather than previously published works.
January 10, 2007: Tibetan Literature Alexander Gardner, one of TBRC's 2006-2007 scholars in residence (Ph.D. University of Michigan, 2006) led the reading of several historical accounts of the sacred site Rdzong shod bde gshegs 'dus pa'i pho brang, a hermitage of 'Jam mgon kong sprul that he, Mchog gyur gling pa, and 'Jam dbyang khyen brtse dbang po opened in the 1860s.
January 24, 2007: Scholarship Andrew Quintman, of the Princeton Society of Fellows (Ph.D. University of Michigan, 2006) presented some of his recent research on the biographical tradition of Mi la res pa. The title of his talk was "Notes on Localizing Tibetan Biography."
February 7, 2007: Tibetan Literature Sarah Jacoby, of Columbia University Society of Fellows (Ph.D. University of Virginia, 2006) led us through a reading of two (unusual and evocative) passages from the autobiography of Sera Khandro, an early 20th century female prophet.
February 21, 2007: Scholarship Cameron Warner (Ph.D. candidate, Harvard University) gave a talk on the changing iconography of the central icon of the Tibetan Jokhang Cathedral, titled "Re/Crowning the Jo bo Rin po che: Texts, Photographs, and Memory."
March 7, 2007: Tibetan Literature Paul Hackett (Ph.D. canditate, Columbia University) led the session in reading excerpts from the Tibet Mirror, a newspaper that was published out of Kalimpong by Tharchin in the first half of the 20th century.
March 14, 2007: Scholarship Jacob Dalton (Yale University) gave a talk on the role of ritual manuals in the development of early tantric Buddhism. His talk was titled "Origins: Evidence from Dunhuang on Early Tantric Buddhism."
April 11, 2007: Tibetan Literature Karma Gongde a researcher at TBRC (Acarya, Sarnath Central Insitute of Higher Studies) led the session, looking at examples of religious poetry (snyan ngag).
October 2, 2007: Tibetan Literature Alexander Gardner led the session. We looked at a passage from a treasure history of one of Mchog gyur gling pa's (1829-1870) cycles, the Zab pa skor bdun.
October 17, 2007: Scholarship Robert Barnett (Columbia University) gave a presentation of his work in progress on the Tibetan glud gtor, or "ransom offering ritual" in a contemporary context.
November 14, 2007: Scholarship Gray Tuttle (Columbia University) gave a presentation of his multifaceted project up at Columbia, "Developing Teaching Tools for Tibetan History." Gray spoke about two forthcoming undergraduate textbooks that he and a few other scholars have been putting together; his plans for an upcoming course entitled "Tibetan Material History & Exploring Tibet:Travel Accounts from the 17th-20th Century," which has as a component an online database of Tibetan material culture; and his creation of an on-line annotated reference bibliography for modern Tibetan history, including his on-going research in local history materials. Gray's important work in this area is partially sponsored by a Rubin Grant for Undergratuate Education in Himalaya Studies.
November 31, 2007: Tibetan Literature Joe McClellan (Ph.D. candidate, Columbia University) led the session. The topic was Khenpo Ngaga's (1879-1941) short writing on rten 'brel (pratityasamutpada).
December 12, 2007: Scholarship Jann Ronis gave a presentation of his research on Katok Monastery and the history of the Dege kingdom.
February 6, 2008: Scholarship Andrew Quintman gave a talk on the sacred geography of Mi la re pa entitled "Toward a Geographic Biography: Mi la ras pa in the Tibetan Landscape."
February 20, 2008: Tibetan Literature Pema Bhum, the director of the Lhatse Tibetan Library, led a reading of Tibetan poetry.
March 5, 2008: Scholarship Benjamin Bogin (Georgetown University) gave a talk titled "Visions of the Copper-Colored Mountain: Padmasambhava's Pure Land in Text, Image, and Ritual."
March 26, 2008: Tibetan Literature Bryan Cuevas (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Florida State University) led the reading of a short piece by Padma gling pa on instructions on drawing linga.
April 9, 2008: Scholarship Michael Sheehy, TBRC's 2008 scholar in residence and director of the Jonang Foundation (Ph.D California Institute of Integral Studies, 2007) gave a talk on the history of the Jonang school of Tibetan Buddhism and his work with the Jonang Foundation. His talk was titled "Sites of the Jonangpa."
April 23, 2008: Scholarship Janet Gyatso (Harvard University) led a conversation on the topic of framing scholarship on Tibet for a wider audience.
September 24, 2008: Scholarship Andrew Quintman gave a talk entitled “Mila Comes Alive! The Architecture of Agency in Tibetan Biography.” He discussed the biographical tradition of Milarepa and the process by which the most famous author concealed that tradition in order to present his own work as the authentic version.
October 8, 2008: Tibetan Literature Michael Sheehy (Jonang Foundation, TBRC) led a reading session: “Tāranātha's Secret: A Reading from the Rnam thar of Phrin las dbang mo.” The group read an excerpt from the autobiography of this consort of Tā ra nā tha (1575-1635), and one of the major figures in the Jo nang transmission lineage of gzhan stong. The selection recounts her conversation with Tā ra nā tha as he is dying; a conversation revealing their intimacy and Tā ra nā tha's own perspective from his deathbed on the socio-political forces at play among the Jo nang pa in early-to-mid 17th century Ü-Tsang.
October 23, 2008: Scholarship Tina Harris (Graduate Center, CUNY), gave a talk entitled “Commodities and Connections: The Social and Economic Geography of a Tibetan Apron.” The talk examined traders’ descriptions of the contemporary declineof the quality of the materials such as wook, demonstrating that values of “purity” and “life” or “dirt” and “death” are attached to goods in very specific times and locales, and acquire particular meanings in these contexts.
November 19, 2008: Tibetan Language Lauran Hartley led a reading of a contemporary Tibetan novel, Nags tshang zhi lu'i skyid sdug, written by Nags tshang Nus blos and privately published in Xining in 2007. We read two episodes: the first describes a scene on the road as the boy travels to Lhasa with his father. The second episode recounts the boy's first 24-hours in a Chinese Communist detention camp.
March 11, 2009: Scholarship Ariana Maki, Curatorial Fellow, Rubin Museum of Art. This paper presents the annual event of Snang dkar bzlog held at the village of Gcal kha near Paro, Bhutan, in which villagers implore local guardian deities for protection from potential harm in the coming year while also purging any negative forces that had accumulated since the last ritual. The ritual takes place in one of the oldest ‘Brug pa bka’ rgyud temples in the country, founded in the thirteenth century by the main conduit for the methodology, Pha jo ‘Brug sgom zhig po (1184-1251). This presentation is one portion of my dissertation, which seeks to analyze the efforts of Pha jo ‘Brug sgom and his children to establish and cultivate patronage in the area, and how these early sites of power served as a pre-existing matrix onto which Zhabs drung ngag dbang rnam rgyal (1594-1691) later grafted his empire to form the beginning of what is modern Bhutan.
March 25, 2009: Scholarship Annabella Pitkin, Columbia PhD candidate, gave a talk called "Renunciation and Independence". It was drawn from her dissertation, which is called "Like Pouring Water into Water"; Buddhist Lineages, Modernity and the Continuity of Memory in the Twentieth-Century History of Tibetan Buddhism.
April 8, 2009: Scholarship Joe Loizzo, Director, Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science. “Science, Religion & Learning in Buddhism and the West: lessons from the Nalanda tradition.”
April 22, 2009: Scholarship Karl Debreczeny, Curator, Rubin Museum of Art. "Ferreting out the Hand of the Master: Paintings Attributed by Inscription to Si tu Pan chen.” A group of paintings have been brought together in the RMA's Patron & Painter exhibition under the heading "Situ the Artist" having inscriptions attributing them to the hand of Chos kyi snang ba, Si Tu Pan chen's personal name. While there is a great deal of information in textual sources about sets designed and commissioned by Si tu, which is the actual focus of the exhibition, the gathering of these inscribed paintings provide us with a unique opportunity to consider for the first time the issue of paintings by Si tu's own hand. While works "by the hand of the master" are the bread and butter of many art historians, the field of Tibetan art history is only beginning to be able to ask these basic questions. Many challenges face such an undertaking: for instance there was more than one Chos kyi snang ba in this tradition, inscriptions can be added later, paintings can be re-attributed, etc.
