Tibetan Reflections : Life In a Tibetan Refugee Community, 1982

Description

Tibetan Reflections Life In a Tibetan Refugee Community by Peter Gold. Introduction by Thubten Jigme Norbu. [University of Indiana]. 1982.

Written in 1982, this collection of essays by Peter Gold offers reflections on his eight-month stay in Dharamshala, India meeting with the Dalai Lama and other members of the Tibetan Refugee community 23 years into its development following the Chinese occupation. Interspersed with short scenes and dialogues, Gold offers glimpses into Tibetan secular and spiritual life with insights on both the exoteric and esoteric aspects on Vajrayana Buddhism. In addition to the author’s own photographs the copies of Tibetan drawings and woodcuts capture animist-influenced spirit practices and a complicated cosmological pantheon of gods, dharma protectors, nagas, and dakinis. Rituals for various offerings and invocations are described, translated, and analyzed, with brief treatments provided on Kalachakra Tantra and other practices. Importantly, as the late Thubten Jigme Norbu, brother of the current Dalai Lama, notes in his short introduction to the work, Gold’s goal is to entertain and distill, so that “one comes to know Tibetans as individuals, as down to earth people, more like yourself and your neighbors than like inhabitants of some exotic Shangri-la.”

Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, this visit to Dharamshala served as the beginning of Gold’s still on-going exploration of the subject matter. A former research assistant to Margaret Mead, in addition to publishing a commercial version of this same text two years later under the same title, he has continued to study and write about Tibet and to provide comparisons between Tibetan spiritual ideas and those found in other cultures as the founder of the Ancient Ways Project.

8vo, 101pp, velo bound typewritten academic manuscript, title and author printed with illustration to front wrap. Some stains to front wrap and book block, water damage to lower back wrap edge and pg 101 verso. Illustrated throughout with drawings, woodblock prints, and photographs. Good condition.

 

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