AHP 35 Review: Monastic and Lay Traditions of NorthEastern Tibet (original) (raw)

Weiner, Benno. 2014. Review: Monastic and Lay Traditions of North-Eastern Tibet. Asian Highlands Perspectives 35:237-242. Review of Yangdon Dhondup, Ulrich Pagel, and Geoffrey Samuel (eds). 2013. Monastic and Lay Traditions of North-Eastern Tibet. Leiden and Boston: Brill. viii. +244. Four Maps, fifteen illustrations, preface, index. Volume 33, Brill's Tibetan Studies Library. ISBN: 9789004255692 (hardcover, 112.50USD). ______ Monastic and Lay Traditions in North-Eastern Tibet, edited by Yangdon Dhondup, Ulrich Pagel, and Geoffrey Samuel, is the product of a 2011 workshop convened at St. Michael's College, Llandaff, Cardiff. Although the conference's focus was the tantric practitioner community of the Reb kong region (Ch. Tongren), the resultant volume expands the scope of inquiry to include surrounding areas as well as monastic communities. The editors have organized the volume's nine chapters into three sections, the first on the Dge lugs pa monastic establishment, the second on Rnying ma pa and Bon tantric communities, and finally 'Ritual and Performance in Contemporary Reb kong'. While the chapters are all informative and scholarly, providing new, important empirical detail on an under researched subject, several tend toward the descriptive. The most successful contributions, however, present their findings within larger analytical and contextual frameworks, giving their chapters explanatory weight beyond the more narrow confines of their studies.