Contributed articles presented at a seminar.

Contributed articles presented at a seminar.

This illustrated volume presents a wide variety of themes from the historical and modern periods of Bhutan, illustrating change and adaptation to new realities. Topics covered include the exploration of early history, Buddhism and the lives of Bhutanese Buddhist saints, the changing role of local, non-Buddhist religious practitioners in today’s society, traditional law and the emergence of a modern legal system, and the seasonal celebrations of an aristocratic family from central Bhutan. The book will be of special interest to students of early Tibetan history, legal history, comparative sociology and cultural anthropology of the Himalayan regions.

Old Tibetan Studies, edited by Cristina Scherrer-Schaub, is an inquiry into secular and religious Old Tibetan documents from Central Asia and Tibet. The volume is written with the intent to confront facts and textualization and contribute to the clarification of particular aspects of the administrative and legislative organization, the ecclesiastical institution, and the religious, monastic, intellectual and material culture of Old Tibet and its borderlands. The material is critically examined from different perspectives, focusing on classical disciplines (history, linguistics, lexicography, philology, codicology and diplomatics). With contributions by Roland Bielmeier, Anne Chayet, Helga Uebach, Kazushi Iwao, Siglinde Dietz, Yoshiro Imaeda, Bianca Horlemann, Brandon Dotson,Tsuguhito Takeuchi and Cristina Scherrer-Schaub.

Monasteries have been the locus classicus of the academic investigation of Tibetan religions. This volume seeks to balance this emphasis with an exploration of the diverse religious specialists who operate outside of the monastery in Tibet and along the Himalayan belt. The articles collected here depict Tantric professionals, visionaries, village lamas, spirit mediums, and female religious leaders whose loyalties reside in the noncelibate sphere but whose activities have had a significant impact on Tibetan religion. Using methodologies drawn from anthropological and textual scholarship, these seven essays bolster our understanding of religious practices and their performers beyond the monasteries of Central and Eastern Tibet, Bhutan, and India from historical times to the present day.

The papers provide access for the first time to Tibetan documents and practices from the period of the tenth to fifteenth century.

This volume, the result of an international collaboration of forty scholars, provides a comprehensive resource on Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in their Chinese, Korean, and Japanese contexts from the first few centuries of the common era to the present.