Renunciation and longing: the life of a twentieth-century Himalayan Buddhist saint

"In the early twentieth century, Khunu Lama wandered like a beggar across Tibet and India, meeting Buddhist masters and living, so his students say, on cold porridge and water. Yet this ragged beggar-yogi became a revered teacher of the current Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At his death in 1977, he wa...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Pitkin, Annabella (Author)
Format: Print Book
Language:English
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Published: Chicago London The University of Chicago Press 2022
In:Year: 2022
Series/Journal:Buddhism and modernity
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B Lama (Lamaism) / Dge-lugs-pa
B Bstan-vdzin-rgyal-mtshan 1894-1977
Further subjects:B Buddhism (China) (Tibet Autonomous Region) Biography
B Khunu Lama Rinpoche (1895-1977)
B Biography 1895-1977
B Buddhist saints Biography
Online Access: Inhaltsverzeichnis (Aggregator)
Parallel Edition:Erscheint auch als: 978-0-226-81691-3
Description
Summary:"In the early twentieth century, Khunu Lama wandered like a beggar across Tibet and India, meeting Buddhist masters and living, so his students say, on cold porridge and water. Yet this ragged beggar-yogi became a revered teacher of the current Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At his death in 1977, he was mourned by Himalayan nuns, Tibetan lamas, and American meditators alike. The myriad surviving stories about Khunu Lama reveal unexpected forms of Tibetan Buddhism, shedding new light on questions of secularism, religion, and what it means to be modern. In Beggar Modern, Annabella Pitkin explores the emotionally charged Tibetan Buddhist imaginaries of renunciation, devotion, and the teacher-student lineage relationship as resources for Tibetan Buddhist approaches to modernity. By examining narrative accounts of the life of a remarkable twentieth-century Himalayan Buddhist and focusing on his remembered identity as a renunciant bodhisattva, Pitkin illuminates Tibetan and Himalayan practices of memory, reinvention, and mourning. Refuting longstanding caricatures of Tibetan Buddhist communities as unable to be modern because of their religious commitments, Pitkin shows instead how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Tibetan Buddhists have used precisely the cultural resources that connect them to their past as vital tools for creating new futures"--
Item Description:Includes bibliographical references and index
ISBN:022679637X