Mountain Dharma : meditative retreat and the Tibetan ascetic self /
"Whether undertaken in a cave or a hut, for a year or three or ten, an emphasis on individual long-term retreat has been one of the most unique and defining features of Tibetan Buddhism throughout its entire history. The first book-length and longitudinal study of meditative retreat, Mountain D...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Columbia University Press,
[2025]
|
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "Whether undertaken in a cave or a hut, for a year or three or ten, an emphasis on individual long-term retreat has been one of the most unique and defining features of Tibetan Buddhism throughout its entire history. The first book-length and longitudinal study of meditative retreat, Mountain Dharma offers a new understanding of the Tibetan eremitic tradition by viewing it as a process of self-fashioning in the pursuit of extreme world- and self-abnegation. It examines a little-studied corpus of 34 retreat texts (comprising 2300 pages), many titled "Mountain Dharma," composed between the 12th and the early decades of the 20th century, which together provide an intellectual history of ascetic practice in Tibet by tracking continuities and discontinuities in how the tradition has problematized six key concerns in the retreat endeavor: place, people, food, bodily threats, the spiritual lineage, and time. David DiValerio argues that a central development in Tibetan religious history is the gradual redefinition of the self as a being whose ascetic and meditative horizons are limited by their position in historical time. This recognition has profound implications for how meditation is thought of in present-day globalized Tibetan Buddhism, in particular the widespread attitude of lived deferential reference to the unattainable (because unavailable) practices of the earliest forebears"-- |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xi, 252 pages) : map |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780231563123 (electronic bk.) 0231563124 |