Yale and Urban India – A growing connection through the Yale India Initiative

How can borderlands be understood as central to religious, literary and political cultures?  In his current research, Andrew Quintman, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, explores this question through research projects located in Kyirong valley of Tibet, a valley slicing through the Himalayan range from the high Tibetan plateau to the low lying southern slope of Nepal. 

Quintman notes that Tibet’s southern border with Nepal has remained largely absent from discussions of Tibetan Buddhist history and religious culture.  Instead, research has tended to focus on Lhasa, the region’s geo-political center, and the surrounding province of the modern-day Tibetan Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).  For this reason, the history of Buddhism in Tibet has largely been understood in relation to the figure of the Dalai Lamas as Central Tibet’s religious and political ruler, together with the major monastic institutions aligned with the Dalai Lama’s hegemonic Geluk sect.  Some recent scholarship has begun to explore Buddhist traditions along Tibet’s eastern periphery.  Yet, Quintman observes that there is considerably more scope for asking what does Buddhism in a borderland mean?  How does a position on the periphery of geo-political centers shape the production of religious and literary cultures?  His research demonstrates that the Kyirong valley, though far from the power centers of Lhasa and Shigatsé, gave rise to a constellation of influential religious institutions, retreat centers, and printing houses. Perhaps more importantly, with its proximity to a long-established principal trade route between Tibet and South Asia, the region served as an active conduit for economic, cultural, and religious exchange.

Quintman’s project seeks to understand Kyirong, and Tibet’s southern border more broadly, as a site of significant religious innovation in the early modern period reflected through the life and literary oeuvre of Chokyi Wangchuk (Chos kyi dbang phyug, 1775-1837), a pivotal figure in the transmission of Buddhist culture in southern Tibet. Recognized as a scholar, historian, and reincarnate Buddhist master, Chokyi Wangchuk is also counted among the region’s most celebrated and prolific authors. At the project’s core is a set of autobiographical writings, letters, and local histories from his Collected Works that serve as one of the region’s principal historical records. A close examination of Chokyi Wangchuk’s life through the lens of these materials illuminates several key factors that led to Kyirong’s ascendant position:  the rise of new Buddhist institutions, expanded literary production, and trans-Himalayan networks of religious exchange during the critical moment just before Tibet’s first major encounters with the modern world. In this respect, the research examines how a provincial region on the Himalayan margins could exercise widespread and enduring influence on the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. In doing so, it hopes to address another set of underlying questions:  to what degree can religious systems stemming from the region be understood as a unique or local form of Buddhism—a borderland Buddhism? And to what degree might Chokyi Wangchuk’s remote monastic seat, far removed from the grand monasteries of Lhasa, be understood as its own powerful center, a “center on the periphery?”

In conjunction with this research, Quintman is also engaged in a collaborative project with Kurtis Schaeffer of the University of Virginia, which documents some of Tibet’s most significant literary, ritual, and visual materials from the 17th century depicting the life of ??kyamuni Buddha.  Centered principally on Jonang Monastery in western Tibet, the project will photograph, archive, analyze, and translate a rare collection of temple murals, inscriptions, and related literature produced by the monastery’s founder. The project will result in a traditional monograph as well as an interactive multi-media website suitable for use as a research tool and teaching platform for courses on Buddhism, Asian Religions, and South Asian history.

Quintman’s current projects emerge from research and teaching interests that encompass Buddhist doctrinal literature and sacred biography, visual and ritual cultures of the wider Himalayan region, and the esoteric Buddhist traditions of Tantra in Tibet.  His recent book project, The Yogin and the Madman:  Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa (Columbia University Press, forthcoming), explores the extensive body of early literature recording the life of Tibet’s acclaimed eleventh-century yogin and poet Milarepa.  His new English translation of the Life of Milarepa was published by Penguin Classics in 2010. Prior to coming to Yale, he served for seven years as Academic Director of the School for International Training’s Tibetan Studies program based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Between 2001-2007 he directed a summer program for Tibetan Studies offered through the University of Michigan. He currently serves as the Co-Chair of the Tibetan and Himalayan Religions Group of the American Academy of Religion, and is co-leading a five-year seminar at the AAR on Religion and the Literary in Tibet. At Yale, Quintman teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate courses on Buddhism and Asian religions, including: Tibetan Buddhism (RLST 126), Visual Worlds of Himalayan Buddhism (RLST 127), Rituals of Buddhist Tantra (RLST 180), Biography in Asian Religions (RLST 182 583), Buddhist Traditions of Mind and Meditation (RLST 413), Reading Tibetan Buddhist Texts (RLST 413).