TY  - BOOK
AU  - Pitkin, Annabella
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022//
TI  - Renunciation and longing: the life of a twentieth-century Himalayan Buddhist saint
T3  - Buddhism and modernity
PB  - The University of Chicago Press
CY  - Chicago
KW  - Buddhism
KW  - China
KW  - Tibet Autonomous Region
KW  - Buddhist saints
AB  - "In the early twentieth century, Khunu Lama wandered like a beggar across Tibet and India, meeting Buddhist masters and living, so his students say, on cold porridge and water. Yet this ragged beggar-yogi became a revered teacher of the current Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At his death in 1977, he was mourned by Himalayan nuns, Tibetan lamas, and American meditators alike. The myriad surviving stories about Khunu Lama reveal unexpected forms of Tibetan Buddhism, shedding new light on questions of secularism, religion, and what it means to be modern. In Beggar Modern, Annabella Pitkin explores the emotionally charged Tibetan Buddhist imaginaries of renunciation, devotion, and the teacher-student lineage relationship as resources for Tibetan Buddhist approaches to modernity. By examining narrative accounts of the life of a remarkable twentieth-century Himalayan Buddhist and focusing on his remembered identity as a renunciant bodhisattva, Pitkin illuminates Tibetan and Himalayan practices of memory, reinvention, and mourning. Refuting longstanding caricatures of Tibetan Buddhist communities as unable to be modern because of their religious commitments, Pitkin shows instead how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Tibetan Buddhists have used precisely the cultural resources that connect them to their past as vital tools for creating new futures"--
SN  - 9780226796376
LA  - English
N1  - Annabella Pitkin
ID  - 1770680462
ER  -