Tibetan Buddhism

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course offers a survey of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist traditions from the 8th century to the present day. In addition to introducing the main schools of Tibetan Buddhism and the Bön religion, we will consider their interactions with Tibetan popular religious practices. We will work from translations of Tibetan sources, such as the medieval hagiography of the 11th-century Tibetan saint Milarepa, but will also read contemporary ethnographies of Tibetan Buddhist communities. By the end of the course, we will be familiar with the the broad outlines of Tibetan Buddhist traditions as approached from historical, philosophical, and anthropological perspectives.