A Buddhist Sensibility: Aesthetic Education at Tibet's Mindröling Monastery (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)

Founded in 1676 during a cosmopolitan early modern period, Mindröling 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 Mindröling 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 Mindröling 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.

History

Townsend, Dominique

Asia

Columbia University Press

Readers of all ages will enjoy this retelling of a beloved spiritual classic. Playfully illustrated in traditional Tibetan style, the story of the monk Shantideva frames his inspiring lessons on the way of the bodhisattva superhero. Shantideva: How to Wake Up a Hero is the retelling of Shantideva’s teachings before a surprised audience, who had thought he was useless and could only eat, sleep, and poop. Leading his listeners into a superhero training of different kind, he reveals the secret to perfect bravery and unbounded compassion and shows how anyone can develop them. You don’t need super-strength or magical powers, he says. You just need practice. A dozen illustrations painted in traditional Tibetan style draw in readers to this work that will be treasured not only by Buddhist families but by anyone who aspires to become more kind and wise.

Shantideva: How to Wake Up a Hero

Children's Books

Literature & Fiction

Wisdom Publications

Poetry. "Caution and charity, travel and sensitivity, in sites South Asian, American, and European, control the humane tones and the short-lined free verse of [THE WEATHER &amp; OUR TEMPERS], which also reflects its author's other work as a scholar of Buddhism. Concise and welcoming, yet intricately tied to place and religion, this quiet debut could take off."—Publishers Weekly "Meditative and mysterious, these spare, intimate poems trace an inner landscape that stretches from Brooklyn to Paris, Tokyo to Kathmandu."—Lizzie Widdicombe of The New Yorker "The poet's spirit settles among objects, the quotidian flotsam. But how to keep the resulting words incantatory? This is Dominique Townsend's gift. Talismans are everywhere in THE WEATHER &amp; OUR TEMPERS, and some of them are 'flapping encyclopedic wings.' While this is a book full of the sense of man's gentle presence in nature, it also rings with apostrophe and sharp conversations. The ache of being human hangs in the doorways of this poetry. You'll be the wiser for entering."—Peter Thompson "To read Dominique Townsend's debut book of poetry is to be seduced by a particularly spiritual, sensual, and uniquely modern world, where the questions of body, mind, and—indeed—soul, are sometimes painful, sometimes witty, sometimes searching, and always exquisite. These are poems to treasure and revisit."—Joanna Hershon

The Weather & Our Tempers

Poetry

Brooklyn Arts Press

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Books by Townsend, Dominique