Materials of Buddhist Culture: Aesthetics and Cosmopolitanism at Mindroling Monastery ...

272 Pages·2012·1.73 MB·English

by  Dominique Townsend

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

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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)

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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.

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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.
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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 Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso, all claim a longstanding and
significant relationship with Mindroling. This diversity was also the case in Mindroling’s early
history. The Central Tibetan monastery has been a center for Tibetan ritual activities associated
with the Tibetan government and population, a hotbed of arts and culture, and a Mecca for
meditators since its earliest days in the early modern climate of late seventeenth century Tibet.
Still known for the elegance and refinement of its ritual and artistic practices, Mindroling has
survived periods of political chaos, violent persecution, the dawn of modernity, and radical
geographical displacement. This dissertation focuses on the first three generations of Mindroling,
looking in particular at the institution’s role as a center for culture and aesthetics. Its many other
faces speak out from the margins and help shape this account of Mindroling’s history.
This introductory chapter presents the general scope of the project and poses the big
picture questions that inspired it, as well as defining key terms and sketching out the theoretical
lenses that have shaped the analysis. There are ways in which the story is highly particular and
perhaps even unique to Mindroling’s original time and place. And there are also ways in which
nearly universal tendencies of people and societies are apparent. The aim throughout is to make
the primary source Tibetan language materials accessible to a contemporary Western reader. To
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that end the project focuses in equal measure on the ways that the Tibetan Buddhist situation at
Mindroling is unique, and the ways it resembles and reflects upon more familiar contexts across
time and place. In its general orientation, this dissertation approaches questions about religion,
culture and power through the focused lens of this one highly influential Tibetan monastic
institution. The cross cultural contexts invoked for comparison and analogy in the coming
chapters include the modern university, Jesuit monasteries, museums, and various models of
polity.
One of the strategies employed is to draw parallels between the Tibetan terms and
concepts that are instrumental in the written work of Mindroling’s founders and Western terms
and concepts, in some cases applying Western theoretical frameworks. The aim is not to reduce
what is unique about Mindroling to generic, universal or Western terms, but rather to make this
written portrait of Mindroling meaningful to a broader audience than would otherwise have
exposure to this type of project. Engaging a range of historical and literary documents as well as
ritual manuals and artistic materials, including references to musical liturgies and various forms
of visual and material culture, the core group of sources cited are culled from within the corpus
of Mindroling itself. But again, this introductory chapter in part serves to situate the primary
Tibetan language research in larger framework where the human and social forces at work in the
example of Mindroling can be considered in a broader humanities based conversation. In order to
do so, the latter part of this chapter surveys the main Western theoretical sources employed.
Throughout this work, it will be important to keep in mind and cannot be overstated that
since Mindroling’s initial foundation in 1676, its cultural production has included fine quality
painting and sculpture, Indic inspired poetry and prose (some of which is characterized by erotic
content, unusual in Tibetan literature), innovative philosophical tracts and ritual manuals