Searching for the body : a contemporary perspective on Tibetan Buddhist tantra
Rae Erin Dachille
Bok · Engelsk · 2022
| Originaltittel | |
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| Omfang | xiv, 301 sider : illustrasjoner
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| Opplysninger | Imagining the Body Mandala -- Constructing the Body Mandala Debate -- "Cutting the Ground": Citations Revealing Mandala Iconography in the Making -- Ngorchen's Armor of Citations: Defending and Delineating the Hevajra Corpus -- "Aligning the Dependently Arisen Connections": The Exegete Rearticulates Body and Text.. - "Tantrism is unique among Buddhist traditions in offering the possibility of liberation here and now rather than in a future rebirth. Its key practice to accomplish this goal is the body mandala, a ritual in which the human body is imagined as a cosmic palace inhabited by buddhas. This book examines the two primary and competing methods, espoused in texts by 15th-century scholar monks Mkhas grub rje and Ngor chen Kun dga' bzang po. Their debate exposes anxieties around the role of creativity in configuring, contextualizing, and interpreting traditional texts in order to reinforce standards of authenticity while at the same time recognizing the central place of imagination in this bodily practice. These debate texts address surprisingly contemporary issues surrounding essentialism, naturalness, constructivism, and creative power that arise most prominently in gender studies; works by Black photographer Lyle Ashton Harris, performance artist Lydia Lunch, and scholar and activist Susan Stryker speak to the enculturalization of the body and its constructed nature and productive tension between artifice and naturalness, limitation and freedom, in ways very similar to the body mandala texts. Rae Dachille argues that considering them together helps us understand how Buddhists constructed meaning, how the West essentialized it for its own purposes, and how Tantric interpretive practices of corporeal fashioning provide a new framework for imagining gender transformation, demonstrating why the search for the body as an object of knowledge continues to be relevant in our times"--
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| Emner | |
| Geografisk emneord | |
| Dewey | |
| ISBN | 9780231206082. - 9780231206099
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