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Book Cover
E-book
Author Pitkin, Annabella, author.

Title Renunciation and longing : the life of a twentieth-century Himalayan Buddhist saint / Annabella Pitkin
Published Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022
©2022

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Description 1 online resource (xxviii, 286 pages) : illustrations, maps
Series Buddhism and modernity
Buddhism and modernity.
Contents Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Technical Note on Phonetic Transcription, Transliteration, and Naming Practices -- Maps of Khunu Lama's Travels -- Chronology -- Introduction. Themes in the Life of a Twentieth- Century Himalayan Buddhist Renunciant -- Chapter 1. "Like Water into Water": Transmission Lineages in Tibetan Buddhism -- Chapter 2. "He abandoned his homeland for the sake of the Dharma": Tibetan Buddhist Imaginaries of Home-Leaving and Renunciation -- Chapter 3. "Aim Your Dharma Practice at a Beggar's Life" -- Chapter 4. Dislocation and Continuity -- Chapter 5. "With such devotion that tears cascade from your eyes": Renunciation, Separation, and Guru Devotion -- Chapter 6. Death and Other Disruptions: Dying Like a Dog in the Wilderness -- Epilogue -- Glossary -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary Through the eventful life of a Himalayan Buddhist teacher, Khunu Lama, this study reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern. In the early twentieth century, Khunu Lama journeyed across Tibet and India, meeting Buddhist masters while sometimes living, so his students say, on cold porridge and water. Yet this elusive wandering renunciant became a revered teacher of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At Khunu Lama's death in 1977, he was mourned by Himalayan nuns, Tibetan lamas, and American meditators alike. The many surviving stories about him reveal significant dimensions of Tibetan Buddhism, shedding new light on questions of religious affect and memory that reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern. In Renunciation and Longing, Annabella Pitkin explores devotion, renunciation, and the teacher-student lineage relationship as resources for understanding 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, affective connection, and mourning. Refuting long-standing 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 and Himalayan Buddhist narrators have used themes of renunciation, devotion, and lineage as touchstones for negotiating loss and vitalizing continuity
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages [207]-265) and index
Notes Description based upon print version of record
In English
Subject Khunu Lama, Rinpoche, 1895-1977.
Buddhism -- China -- Tibet Autonomous Region -- Biography
Buddhist saints -- Biography
RELIGION / General.
Buddhism
Buddhist saints
Biography & non-fiction prose.
Religion: general.
Tibetan Buddhism.
Biography.
China -- Tibet Autonomous Region
Genre/Form Biographies
Biographies.
Biographies.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2021042965
ISBN 0226816915
9780226816913