For Saga Dawa Duchen, the Tibetan commemoration of Buddha Śākyamuni's birth, enlightenment and parinirvāṇa. 📷 from Zhalu Monastery, Tibet

Busy end of semester so haven’t really posted at all. But had dinner at the mouth of the CT River last night and now cleaning off kayak gear listening to Patrick O’Brian, so it must be summer right?

#SeaKayakSunday Stonington, CT to Fishers Island, NY playing in the tide races at Latimer Light and the cans. Winds 15-20 kts, seas 3-4 ft. Gonna be sore tomorrow. (No action shots for obvious reasons.) #seakayak #seakayaking

Identified as a "Buddhist priest" and holding a prayer wheel, a figure such as this would have passed for a generic Tibetan lama in the visual language of the early 20th century. In this case, however, we also know this monk's name: Sherab Gyatso. 🧵 🗃️ 📜 #Tibet

Took a little social media break but now I'm back. So here's Luna after enjoying the freshly mowed lawn.

Spending the next few days thinking about Buddhism in Imperial Period Tibet. Meghan Howard has put together a stellar lineup to discuss work on and from Dunhuang. macmillan.yale.edu/eastasia/eve... #TibetanStudies

Pretty sure this is the best Wikipedia page you’ll have read this week.

Appearing on the Sinica podcast was a bucket list sort of thing. Thanks to @kaiserkuo.bsky.social for having me on to talk about ethnopolitics in China. There's more I wish I had said, and some things I wish I had said differently, but give it a listen! www.sinicapodcast.com/p/live-at-pi...

Watching Mon Mothma dance in that wedding scene, this is pretty much the first thing I thought of, ngl.

I often poll my students: is Buddhism a philosophy, a religion, or a way of life (choose only one)? They increasingly choose religion, and if they don't at the start of class, they definitely do by the end. 👏 👏 👏

One of my main teaching goals lately is to show that Buddhism is indeed a religion and not just a way of life, and that the Buddha is actually kinda central to it…

I'm happy to announce that the complete retrospective of films by Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden that I've curated will be showing in Vancouver: Compassionate Light: Stories of Tibet by Pema Tseden. May 16-19. At the VIFF Theatre @viffest.bsky.social Details here: viff.org/series/pema-...

Tales of Tourist Photos, Pt. 1: If photography changed the way people viewed the world, the Eastman Kodak camera transformed the late Victorian practice of tourism. The handheld Kodak made photography available to casual amateurs, creating the vernacular form of snapshot photography. 🧵 🗃️ 📜 #Japan

📚 We added 33 new translations in April, incl. texts by Garab Dorje, Śrī Siṃha, Jigme Lingpa (1730–1798), Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo (1820–1892), Khenchen Ngawang Palzang (1879–1941), Drimé Özer (1881–1924), Sera Khandro (1892–1940), Gendün Chöpel (1903–1951), Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (1910–1991)...

From the Yum Chenmo above to the trio of figures below, this Dorje Sempa yab yum is atypical. At least 2 artists contributed, with a steadier hand rendering the main deity pair as compared to the flanking Kagyu & Drukpa Kagyu lineage figures. 📷: NMB #ThangkaTuesday #himalaya #bhutan #buddhistart

The Atlas Chinensis by Olfert Dapper (1636–1689) is among the most visually embellished European treatments of China from the late 17th century. Never traveling to Asia, Dapper used reports from the 2nd and 3rd Dutch embassies to China and consulted older Jesuit accounts. 🧵 🗃️ 🀄️📚 #China

Exquisite nails & cuff on this manicule! From the life of St Mochóemóc founder of Leighmore, Co. Tipperary, in The 'Codex Kilkenniensis', our 15th century collection of the lives of Irish saints #ManiculeMonday #ManuscriptMonday

🎉📜Happy #ManuscriptMonday with this wonderful illumination that depicts the Siege of Antioch (1097-1098) BnF, Français 779, fol. 37v #sscle #middleages #medieval #crusade #crusades #latineast #manuscript #medievalmanuscript #art #antioch #illumination

"Our temporary bodies are like floating clouds, and our grasslike lives resemble a flash of lightning." Words written after the passing of Gyōshin, a monk near the top of the 8th-c. Japanese monastic order, preserved in the colophon to this sutra #ManuscriptMonday colbase.nich.go.jp/collection_i...

#ManuscriptMonday Writing to the Dalai Lama edition. A letter & envelope dated March 18, 1946, addressed to the Regent of Tibet (perhaps Takdrak Rinpoche) on behalf of the 14th Dalai Lama, written by Wesley Needham, librarian at the Beinecke Rare book & Manuscript Library. 1/

Late #SeaKayakSunday posting. Exciting big-water day around Jamestown, RI on Sunday: winds gusting to 25 kts and swell at about 4 ft. Got to work through some incident management in the rocks & luckily everyone was okay with just a broken paddle in the end. #seakayaking #seakayak

Wonderful evening yesterday with the 5-College Buddhist Studies faculty group to discuss the late Peter Gregory’s last unpublished essay on the autobiographical writing of Zongmi. Thanks to @protass.bsky.social for his moving opening remarks.

Wonderful evening yesterday with the 5-College Buddhist Studies faculty group to discuss the late Peter Gregory’s last unpublished essay on the autobiographical writing of Zongmi. Thanks to @protass.bsky.social for his moving opening remarks.

Also this: "The disciplines of American studies and religion saw the largest declines in the number of institutions awarding degrees in these disciplines over that time period" www.amacad.org/sites/defaul...

whoa religion is halving itself

Generosity is the theme of this #ThangkaTuesday. This charming Vajradhara (རྡོ་རྗེ་འཆང་།), Holder of the Indestructible, is in a private collection shown to me years ago. I adore its simplicity & beauty, and that little extra head tilt. My gratitude to those who have shown me so much. #himalaya #bhutan

Before nickelodeons and cinema halls, “magic lantern” shows were an important part of popular American entertainment. Hand tinted glass slides were used by children’s story tellers, stage magicians, and traveling public lecturers in town and cities across the United States. 🧵 🗃️ 📜 #Japan

It's #ManuscriptMonday! The Irk Bitig, a Book of Divination from the 9th–10th centuries CE was probably written in Old Turkic in Turkic Runes and was found in the Dunhuang cave complex in western China! You can read more about it here: idp.bl.uk/blog/an-omen...

#ManuscriptMonday Jesuits in Tibet edition. First page of Jesuit Missionary and early Tibetologist Ippolito Desideri's fascinating early 18th-c treatise _Inquiry concerning the Doctrines of Previous Lives and Emptiness, Offered to the Scholars of Tibet by the Star Head Lama called Ippolito_ 1/

#ManuscriptMonday Jesuits in Tibet edition. First page of Jesuit Missionary and early Tibetologist Ippolito Desideri's fascinating early 18th-c treatise _Inquiry concerning the Doctrines of Previous Lives and Emptiness, Offered to the Scholars of Tibet by the Star Head Lama called Ippolito_ 1/

Official announcement tibet.net/his-holiness...

What happened this morning?

“His Holiness Pope Francis dedicated himself to the service of others, consistently revealing by his own actions how to live a simple, but meaningful life. The best tribute we can pay to him is to be a warm-hearted person, serving others wherever and in whatever way we can.” ~The Dalai Lama~

That map on the cover is amazing, and I'm not surprised to see the Potala Palace used as a metonym for both Lhasa and Tibet as a whole. Worth taking a moment to follow the link below.

It certainly could provide insight into a popular "visual lexicon" of Asia at the time! There's some albums available for sale online, but I've just posted a partial catalogue held by a French university. bsky.app/profile/pete...

The beta version of the BDRC archive search is a major improvement. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out.

BDRC’s collection of searchable etexts was just increased by 900,000 pages! The full-text contents of this massive store of Tibetan literature will enhance your experience finding information and relevant passages. These 900k pages of etexts were generated by applying OCR to 3k vols of Tib. books.

European and American chocolatiers were among the businesses that embraced the use of beautifully illustrated advertising trade cards. To inspire collection, the cards often depicted romantic, if not highly stereotyped, imagery. 🧵 🗃️ 📜 #Japan

Buddhist traditions typically hold three-month retreats during the rainy season. Have you ever wondered how the tradition of doing retreats during wet weather got started? The origins, timing, and procedures of the rains retreat are meticulously described in The Chapter on the Rains (Toh 1-4),

Sad

Tibetan author writes a life of the Buddha in 125 chapters, each begins with a chapter title, great. They are preceded by an enumerated table of contents with each chapter listed, sure. This is preceded by a list of chapter titles in verse, ok. But every version of a chapter title is different, lol.

Finally got here!

Bhikkhu Bodhi posted a letter from the Buddhist Council of New York in support of Mohsen Mahdawi. Excerpt: "Mohsen has been a clear and consistent advocate for peace, human dignity, and nonviolence. At no time has he expressed or endorsed hate speech or divisive rhetoric of any kind."

cf: Pigs eat the flesh of dead men; People eat the innards of dead pigs. Pigs do not abhor the stink of man; And men, for their part, say pigs are fragrant. ... If both would just stop eating each other, Lotus flowers would grow in boiling soup. - Hanshan www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

Always liked that old story and the verse in Tibetan: འཕགས་པ་ཀ་ཏྱཱ་ནས། ཕ་ཤ་ཟ་ཞིང་མ་ལ་རྡེག༎ ལས་ངན་དགྲ་བོ་པང་ན་བཟུང༌༎ ཆུང་མས་ཁྱོ་ཡི་རུས་པ་འཆའ༎ འཁོར་བའི་ཆོས་ལ་གད་མོ་བྲོ༎

The oldest non-book printed Sanskrit texts* (in Siddham script) are from the Tang Empire, produced since the 8th century. Here's a magnificent sample produced in Sichuan, found in Xi'an, ca. 9th century. 🥰 1/4 *except clay votive tablets stamped from moulds.

Manuscripts were thought to have the power to save women suffering in a Buddhist hell of menstrual blood. In this Japanese image from the Tateyama Mandara, priests let float copies of the Blood Bowl Sutra that the women chase after in the hope that it will liberate them from hell. #ManuscriptMonday