Andrew Quintman
Buddhism in Tibet & Himalaya | Religion Dept @ Wesleyan U | The Yogin & the Madman | The Life of Milarepa | http://journaloftibetanliterature.org | http://lifeofthebuddha.org | www.andrewquintman.com | #TibetanStudies #BuddhistStudies #seakayaking
- For Saga Dawa Duchen, the Tibetan commemoration of Buddha Śākyamuni's birth, enlightenment and parinirvāṇa. 📷 from Zhalu Monastery, Tibet
- Busy end of semester so haven’t really posted at all. But had dinner at the mouth of the CT River last night and now cleaning off kayak gear listening to Patrick O’Brian, so it must be summer right?
- #SeaKayakSunday Stonington, CT to Fishers Island, NY playing in the tide races at Latimer Light and the cans. Winds 15-20 kts, seas 3-4 ft. Gonna be sore tomorrow. (No action shots for obvious reasons.) #seakayak #seakayaking
- Took a little social media break but now I'm back. So here's Luna after enjoying the freshly mowed lawn.
- Spending the next few days thinking about Buddhism in Imperial Period Tibet. Meghan Howard has put together a stellar lineup to discuss work on and from Dunhuang. macmillan.yale.edu/eastasia/eve... #TibetanStudies
- Keynote lecture by Matthew Kapstein “Wisdom and Tradition in Imperial Tibet: Apropos of Gtsug lag once more”
- In the final formal presentation of the conference, Lewis Doney brings early Tibet back to the study of religion.
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- This cracked me up: “we thought abt donating them to Buddhist groups but decided it was more fair to sell them to Buddhists instead…”
- Watching Mon Mothma dance in that wedding scene, this is pretty much the first thing I thought of, ngl.
- this was the second thing
- #Andor obvs
- I often poll my students: is Buddhism a philosophy, a religion, or a way of life (choose only one)? They increasingly choose religion, and if they don't at the start of class, they definitely do by the end. 👏 👏 👏
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- "Gutenberg woodblock" is not a phrase I had imagined
- #ManuscriptMonday Writing to the Dalai Lama edition. A letter & envelope dated March 18, 1946, addressed to the Regent of Tibet (perhaps Takdrak Rinpoche) on behalf of the 14th Dalai Lama, written by Wesley Needham, librarian at the Beinecke Rare book & Manuscript Library. 1/
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View full threadNeedham was interested in all sorts of things, and took copious notes. He helped Tsepon Shakabpa come to New Haven and publish A Political History of Tibet. He also worked with the Mongolian reincarnate lama Dilowa Hetukhtu to study various elements of Tibetan Buddhism. 3/
- More on the Kangyur that Needham arranged (@babelstone.co.uk beat me to posting it) bsky.app/profile/babe...
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- Kind of adorable he wrote that
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- lol, you beat me to posting that!
- Wesley Needham was a fascinating figure. Through his correspondence w/ the 14th Dalai Lama, he was able to request a woodblock print edition of the 100-volume Lhasa edition of the Kangyur, rare in the west at that time. It travelled by horse caravan & freighter, reaching New Haven in February 1950.
- Late #SeaKayakSunday posting. Exciting big-water day around Jamestown, RI on Sunday: winds gusting to 25 kts and swell at about 4 ft. Got to work through some incident management in the rocks & luckily everyone was okay with just a broken paddle in the end. #seakayaking #seakayak
- Wonderful evening yesterday with the 5-College Buddhist Studies faculty group to discuss the late Peter Gregory’s last unpublished essay on the autobiographical writing of Zongmi. Thanks to @protass.bsky.social for his moving opening remarks.
- And so glad I had a chance to say farewell to the singular Jay Garfield, philosopher extraordinaire and my undergrad advisor, before he moves to Tasmania in a couple of weeks.
- Wonderful evening yesterday with the 5-College Buddhist Studies faculty group to discuss the late Peter Gregory’s last unpublished essay on the autobiographical writing of Zongmi. Thanks to @protass.bsky.social for his moving opening remarks.
- Also this: "The disciplines of American studies and religion saw the largest declines in the number of institutions awarding degrees in these disciplines over that time period" www.amacad.org/sites/defaul...
- Lots of fascinating, although not always heartening, data, in this report: The Academic Humanities Today: Findings from the 2024 Department Survey www.amacad.org/humanities-i...
- whoa religion is halving itself
- Yikes! But go Musicology I guess.
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- I feel like there's a good time-travel novel in there somewhere
- Generosity is the theme of this #ThangkaTuesday. This charming Vajradhara (རྡོ་རྗེ་འཆང་།), Holder of the Indestructible, is in a private collection shown to me years ago. I adore its simplicity & beauty, and that little extra head tilt. My gratitude to those who have shown me so much. #himalaya #bhutan
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- I also like the lotus stem at the bottom
- Unusual to see it on black, no?
- #ManuscriptMonday Jesuits in Tibet edition. First page of Jesuit Missionary and early Tibetologist Ippolito Desideri's fascinating early 18th-c treatise _Inquiry concerning the Doctrines of Previous Lives and Emptiness, Offered to the Scholars of Tibet by the Star Head Lama called Ippolito_ 1/
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- Waiting until I can write it in Latin
- A huge amount of work has been published on Desideri's life, his time in Tibet. Of particular note are Pomplun, Trent. Jesuit on the Roof of the World : Ippolito Desideri’s Mission to Eighteenth-Century Tibet. Oxford University Press, 2010. global.oup.com/academic/pro... 4/
- A careful study and partial translation of Desideri's Inquiry have been published in Lopez, Donald S, and Thupten Jinpa. Dispelling the Darkness : A Jesuit’s Quest for the Soul of Tibet. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067... 5/
- Desideri's _Inquiry_ is a massive work of over 464 handwritten Tibetan pages, giving a detailed refutation of the basic ideas of Buddhism, such as karma & rebirth, based on his own careful reading of Tibetan Buddhist treatises such as Tsongkhapa's Great Stages of the Path (Lam rim chen mo). 2/
- The outline (sa bcad) of Desideri's _Inquiry_ follows a traditional Tibetan format:
- Official announcement tibet.net/his-holiness...
- What happened this morning?
- Wake me up when there's white smoke.
- That map on the cover is amazing, and I'm not surprised to see the Potala Palace used as a metonym for both Lhasa and Tibet as a whole. Worth taking a moment to follow the link below.
- A partial "Asia" album of Chocolat Pupier trade cards from the 1930s is viewable through the Bastaire Collection at Clermont Auvergne University. Overall, its neat collection of popular French literature, often illustrated. tinyurl.com/mvnsnwcm
- European and American chocolatiers were among the businesses that embraced the use of beautifully illustrated advertising trade cards. To inspire collection, the cards often depicted romantic, if not highly stereotyped, imagery. 🧵 🗃️ 📜 #Japan
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View full threadIt certainly could provide insight into a popular "visual lexicon" of Asia at the time! There's some albums available for sale online, but I've just posted a partial catalogue held by a French university. bsky.app/profile/pete...
- A partial "Asia" album of Chocolat Pupier trade cards from the 1930s is viewable through the Bastaire Collection at Clermont Auvergne University. Overall, its neat collection of popular French literature, often illustrated. tinyurl.com/mvnsnwcm
- Yes, exactly. This is amazing! Thanks for sharing.
- The beta version of the BDRC archive search is a major improvement. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out.
- Please note these new texts are only findable on BUDA 2.0 beta.bdrc.io. N.B. most of the books we OCRed for this are under copyright so we can only show you contextual search results that are similar to “snippet view” on Google Books - but we allow for unlimited searches w/in copyrighted etexts.
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- Curious to see the other 251 cards in this series!
- Sad
- Tibetan author writes a life of the Buddha in 125 chapters, each begins with a chapter title, great. They are preceded by an enumerated table of contents with each chapter listed, sure. This is preceded by a list of chapter titles in verse, ok. But every version of a chapter title is different, lol.
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- Yes good point. It nicely encapsulates a very long story in a way that can be memorized and recited. A little like Nagarjuna’s praise of the Buddha’s 12 deeds. www.lotsawahouse.org/indian-maste...
- Reminds me of the great essay by Dan Martin on Tibetan tables of contents (dkar chag): "We may seem to be proposing that "tables of contents" as we usually understand the term should be recognized as one of the great genres of Tibetan literature." Tibetan authors sure do love them.
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- Finally got here!
- Welcome!
- Finally caught up on the season finale of The White Lotus. There's a lot to say about the representation of Buddhism, what it gets right and less right, but ultimately I think it hits as an evocation of samsara. Reminded me of the frequently told story about the Buddha's disciple Kātyāyana:
- Always liked that old story and the verse in Tibetan: འཕགས་པ་ཀ་ཏྱཱ་ནས། ཕ་ཤ་ཟ་ཞིང་མ་ལ་རྡེག༎ ལས་ངན་དགྲ་བོ་པང་ན་བཟུང༌༎ ཆུང་མས་ཁྱོ་ཡི་རུས་པ་འཆའ༎ འཁོར་བའི་ཆོས་ལ་གད་མོ་བྲོ༎
- Thanks for this. I was looking for the original verse!
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- I'm sure I'm late to this, but how about all those Pema Chodron books Chelsea & Saxon are reading?
