Materials of Buddhist Culture: Aesthetics and Cosmopolitanism at Mindroling Monastery
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Columbia University Academic Commons Materials of Buddhist Culture: Aesthetics and Cosmopolitanism at Mindroling Monastery Dominique Townsend Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 © 2012 Dominique Townsend All rights reserved ABSTRACT Materials of Buddhist Culture: Aesthetics and Cosmopolitanism at Mindroling Monastery Dominique Townsend This dissertation investigates the relationships between Buddhism and culture as exemplified at Mindroling Monastery. Focusing on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, I argue that Mindroling was a seminal religio-cultural institution that played a key role in cultivating the ruling elite class during a critical moment of Tibet’s history. This analysis demonstrates that the connections between Buddhism and high culture have been salient throughout the history of Buddhism, rendering the project relevant to a broad range of fields within Asian Studies and the Study of Religion. As the first extensive Western-language study of Mindroling, this project employs an interdisciplinary methodology combining historical, sociological, cultural and religious studies, and makes use of diverse Tibetan sources. Mindroling was founded in 1676 with ties to Tibet’s nobility and the Fifth Dalai Lama’s newly centralized government. It was a center for elite education until the twentieth century, and in this regard it was comparable to a Western university where young members of the nobility spent two to four years training in the arts and sciences and being shaped for positions of authority. This comparison serves to highlight commonalities between distant and familiar educational models and undercuts the tendency to diminish Tibetan culture to an exoticized imagining of Buddhism as a purely ascetic, world renouncing tradition. Although Mindroling was in many regards an exemplary model of monasticism, rather than focusing solely on renunciation Mindroling’s founders aimed to integrate a Buddhist doctrinal perspective with being in the world. The cultivation of aesthetics and practical ethics were as central to a Mindroling education as composition, rhetoric and Buddhist doctrine. During the dissertation’s period of focus, Mindroling alumni consistently went on to successful careers in a highly complex sociopolitical milieu that comprised Tibetan, Mongol and Qing elements. In addition to its role as a school, the monastery was a center for literature and rituals that helped unify the Tibetan polity, a unification that was still underway and frequently contested. Buddhist rituals are inextricably tied to Buddhist aesthetics and material culture, making Mindroling a center for the arts as well. Mindroling was also known for esoteric meditative techniques, martial rituals, a marriage of classical Indic and innovative Tibetan styles, and the relative prominence of women teachers. In all aspects Mindroling crystallized an early modern zeitgeist that was both uniquely Tibetan and highly cosmopolitan. The monastery received the favor of Tibet’s most influential patrons, but as a result of sectarian conflicts Mindroling was razed to the ground by Dzungar Mongols in 1717. A female Buddhist expert joined forces with a former Mindroling student who had gone on to become the highest ranking Tibetan leader to reestablish the monastery. Mindroling thrived and became known as the “mother monastery” to an extensive network of institutions across the vast Tibetan cultural region that based their ritual liturgies, art practices and curricula on the Mindroling model. Official institutional documents including the monastic history, constitution and curriculum are analyzed in conjunction with biographies and letters to construct a history of Mindroling’s role in shaping the high culture and cosmopolitan aesthetic of early modern Tibet. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements............................................................................................................. ii List of abbreviations ............................................................................................................ i Chapter 1 Introduction - A Buddhist Sense of Beauty ....................................................................1 Chapter 2 The Historic Background and the Foundation of Mindroling.......................................54 Chapter 3 Letters in the Making of Mindroling...........................................................................117 Chapter 4 Education at Mindroling - Buddhist Higher Learning and High Culture ...................165 Chapter 5 Epilogue - Future Generations and Future Research ..................................................225 i LIST OF ABBREVATIONS Catalogue A O rgyan smin grol gling gi dkar chag (Monastic catalogue containing 17th and 18th century documents) Catalogue B ’Og min O rgyan smin grol gling gi dkar chag dran pa’i me long (Monastic catalogue composed in the 20th century) TLOB Gter chen chos gyi rgyal po’i rnam thar dad pa’i shing (Terdak Lingpa’s “outer” biography) DLCL Rgya bod hor sog gi mchog dman bar pa rnams la ’phrin yig snyan ngag tu bkod pa rab snyan rgyud mang (The Fifth Dalai Lama’s collected letters) TLCL Collected Religious Instructions and Letters of Gter-bdag-gling pa ’gyur med rdo rje (Terdak Lingpa’s collected letters) MPB Rje btsun mi ’gyur dpal gyi sgron ma’i rnam thar dad pa’i gdung sel (Mingyur Paldron’s biography) i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible without the support and guidance of my advisor Gray Tuttle and dissertation committee members Janet Gyatso, Bernard Faure, Chun- fang Yu, and Michael Puett. Thank you all. My deepest gratitude to Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche and Jetsun Dechen Paldron of Mindroling for their generosity and kindness in welcoming me to undertake this research. Pema Bhum and Gen Jamspal supported my efforts to read and translate the more challenging primary sources and on many occasions I would have been entirely in the dark without their help. I also extend my deepest thanks and gratitude to Gene Smith, who encouraged and inspired me. Robert Thurman’s mentoring over the years and in particular his help reading the Fifth Dalai Lama’s letters have been invaluable. I am also grateful to Tenzin Norbu, Annabella Pitkin, Benno Weiner, Jeff Watt, Alex Garnder, Julie Regan, Stacey van Vleet, Evan Neely and Buyun Chen. I owe a special note of thanks to Lan Wu for her technical support. Over the years since I first became interested in Mindroling, Hubert Decleer, Nazneen Zafar, Ben Bogin, Andrew Quintman, Peter Moran, Kabir Heimsath, Isabelle Onians, Katrina Edwards, Stuart Hawkins and Mikiko Hara have all played a part in inspiring this project, whether through conversation, suggestion or by being excellent travel companions. Thanks are also due to my parents, brother, extended family, and ever supportive friends. And finally I extend thanks and gratitude to my partner, a deeply reflective and astute listener, Aaron Sing Fox, and to the most darling and supportive son I can imagine, Sage William Fox. ii 1 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION - A BUDDHIST SENSE OF BEAUTY …we need see nothing wrong with the presence of objects, and even wealth, in religious practice. A small group of erudite monks within the Buddhist tradition has championed the idea that the highest spiritual goals can only be pursued in isolation from the material world. But we need not adopt this position. Nor did most Buddhists ever adopt a radical rejection of the material world.1 - John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture Chapter Overview This dissertation tells a story about a group of people who built a small, influential center for religion and culture. The main characters of the story—a Tibetan visionary known as Terdak Lingpa (gter bdag gling pa, 1646-1714), the Fifth Dalai Lama Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso (ngag dbang blo bzang rgya mtsho, 1617-1682) and their inner circle—lived during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Central Tibet, in and around the city of Lhasa. The institution they established is called Mindroling (smin grol gling), or the Isle of Ripening and Liberation. Still vibrant today, Mindroling is an institution with numerous distinct faces. Just as a painted or sculpted portrait would necessarily omit certain aspects of its subject, taking up this dissertation’s particular perspective inevitably precludes the telling of other important stories about Mindroling. It is my hope that this perspective will be of value, not least of all because of its novelty relative to more usual perspectives on Buddhism and Tibet. This project cannot 1 John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 23. 2 possibly attend to all of Mindroling’s areas of interest and I intend to pursue further topics related to Mindroling in the future. To illustrate the multiplicity of Mindroling, today Buddhist nuns conducting long-life rituals at a remote nunnery in Eastern Tibet, a community of lay tantric experts practicing “black magic” rites in Qinghai, monks collecting offerings in a temple on the Barkor in Lhasa, Tibetan exile artists creating three dimensional mandalas in Santa Fe, American psychotherapists on meditation retreat in the hills of Virginia, and scholars and practitioners from all the Tibetan Buddhist sects including the Fourteenth