Thursday, February 21, 2019
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM (ET)
Tang Teaching Museum Payne
Event Type
Discussion
Contact
Department
Tang Teaching Museum/Art Gallery
Link
http://ems.skidmore.edu/MasterCalendar/EventDetails.aspx?EventDetailId=24245
Join us at 6:00 PM Thursday,
February 21, as Janet Gyatso, Harvard Professor of Buddhist Studies, reflects
on reading and translating the visionary autobiography the eighteenth-century
Tibetan Buddhist master, Jigme Lingpa.
This talk will discuss the
Tibetan art of writing autobiography and how the modern scholar herself becomes
connected to it. It will focus on how Gyatso appreciated, translated, and wrote
about the “secret autobiographies” of Jigme Lingpa, an 18th century visionary,
who was himself trying to connect to the 8th century master Padmasambhava. It
will reflect on how the speaker worked with Tibetan scholars to translate the
text, and what “understanding” the work meant, both for her and for the Tibetan
readers with whom she studied. Finally, it will talk about how the author of
the autobiography used writing and vision to imagine himself.
This event is free and open
to the public.
Programming for The
Second Buddha was coordinated by Associate Professor of Asian Studies
Benjamin Bogin through the Skidmore Faculty Scholar Residency, which is
co-sponsored by the Center for Leadership, Teaching, and Learning and the
Office of the Dean of Special Programs; and the Tang Teaching Museum.
About
Janet Gyatso
Janet Gyatso is a specialist
in Buddhist studies with concentration on Tibetan and South Asian cultural and
intellectual history. Her books include Apparitions of the Self: The
Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary; In the Mirror of
Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan
Buddhism; Women of Tibet; and Being Human in a Buddhist
World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet, which
focuses upon alternative early modernities and the conjunctions and
disjunctures between religious and scientific epistemologies in Tibetan
medicine in the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries. She has also been writing on
sex and gender in Buddhist monasticism, and on the current female ordination
movement in Buddhism. Previous topics of her scholarship have included visionary
revelation in Buddhism; lineage, memory, and authorship; the philosophy of
experience; and autobiographical writing in Tibet. Her present research focuses
on poetics, as well as a project in animal studies. Gyatso was president of the
International Association of Tibetan Studies and co-chair of the Buddhism
Section of the American Academy of Religion. She is the Hershey Professor of
Buddhist Studies and the Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs at the
Harvard Divinity School.
See
https://hds.harvard.edu/people/janet-gyatso