Dominique Townsend. A Buddhist Sensibility: Aesthetic Education at Tibet's Mindröling Monastery. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Illustrations. 272 pp. $29.99 (e-book), ISBN 978-0-231-55105-2; $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-19487-7; $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-19486-0.
Reviewed by Lan Wu (Mount Holyoke College)
Published on H-Buddhism (January, 2022)
Commissioned by Lucia Galli
Mindröling: A Civilizational Center in Tibet and the Becoming of Buddhist Literati Culture
How did a Nyingma monastery of several hundred students near Lhasa become a civilizational center in the second half of the seventeenth century? That was when the Dalai Lama’s Buddhist government—the Ganden Podrang—was consolidating its power and remaking Tibet’s political landscape, with massive Géluk monasteries increasingly overtaking other norms of religious institutions in Tibet. Given these specific historical circumstances, any attempt to answer the question posed above is an admirable and exciting undertaking. Dominique Townsend expertly delivers this in her new book, A Buddhist Sensibility: Aesthetic Education at Tibet’s Mindröling Monastery.
Mindröling is considered one of the six Nyingma “mother monasteries” (Tib. ma dgon) by Tibetan Buddhists across the Himalayas and beyond. Founded in 1676 by the visionary Terdak Lingpa (1646-1714), Mindröling attracted many Nyingma Buddhists as a center of Buddhist learning, established a vast monastic network centered on its curriculum, and trained men and women. Furthermore, Mindröling also educated Tibetan aristocrats who went on to serve in the Ganden Podrang Buddhist government. Townsend explores the central role that Mindröling had in inventing a new norm of Nyingma institutions in the aftermath of the Ganden Podrang’s inception in 1642, but this is also a story of how Mindröling became the place for Tibetan aristocrats to pursue higher education in central Tibet ever since it opened its door to a diverse student body.
Despite his political investment and leadership role in the Géluk Buddhist government, the Fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso (1617-82), was one of the most significant characters in Mingdröling’s early history. Although he was almost thirty years Terdak Lingpa’s senior and only saw Mindröling’s beginnings before dying in 1682, the monastery was to play a vital part in the Dalai Lama’s state-building enterprise and remained crucial to his vision of the new inclusive Tibetan polity. In examining the evolution of Mindröling, Townsend departs from much seminal and emerging research focusing on a single monastery or one aspect of monastic operations; instead, she situates its developments within the rapidly changing social and political history of Tibet at a volatile moment.[1] Throughout this book, Townsend patiently weaves together stories of what happened inside and outside of Mindröling in its first fifty years, when the monastery became a cultural center that contributed to the development of a Buddhist sensibility through its aesthetic education.
This overarching theme connects the five chapters, each one discussing how aesthetic education shaped the institutional identity of Mindröling. At the core of this systematic aesthetic education were Terdak Lingpa and his family. They had played an instrumental role in institutionalizing an expansive worldview that was deeply rooted in Buddhist philosophy and transcended sectarian confines. Townsend explicitly pinpoints in the fifth and final chapter that the biggest asset of the monastery was this visionary founder. Terdak Lingpa was a famed treasure revealer and a scion of the prestigious Nyö clan. His family lineage had wielded significant power before the Géluk rose to dominance in the mid-seventeenth century. This clarification helps to retrospectively explain why the first three chapters focus on the way Terdak Lingpa and the Nyö clan retained their political and social capital, and ultimately resuscitated their influence in the second half of the seventeenth century. Terdak Lingpa navigated a fast-changing political landscape that was increasingly defined by the Géluk Buddhist government in central Tibet. Chapters 1 and 2 describe the specific historical conditions in which Terdak Lingpa founded the monastery and its architectural aesthetic appeals. Appearance mattered greatly in Mindröling, for it was designed as “a pleasure trove for the Buddhist senses” (p. 53). Chapter 2 opens with a set of questions on history as lived experience, but as the chapter concludes, one is left wondering what impressions the architectural structures, colors, scents, lighting, and textures of the place made on a visitor or a student living there.
Chapter 3 delves into the interpersonal relationship between Terdak Lingpa and the reigning Fifth Dalai Lama, a mutually supportive and valuable connection. The Fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso, still had a long way to go after the Oirot Khoshot Mongols had backed the founding of his government in 1642. He and his able regent, Desi Sangyé Gyatso (1653-1705), continued to consolidate power and solicit support within and beyond the Géluk school in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, it misses the point to read the Fifth Dalai Lama’s support for Terdak Lingpa and Mindröling as nothing but a political calculation. Indeed, Townsend shows in this book that the reigning Dalai Lama had strong familial and intellectual ties with the Nyingma school, which he continued to foster during his lifetime. He arranged a relative to be Terdak Lingpa’s secret consort (gsang yum) in order to support Terdak Lingpa’s visionary activities and improve his poor health.[2] The Fifth Dalai Lama’s support for Terdak Lingpa’s Buddhist practices was a good reminder that sectarian tensions found in late accounts did not capture the full range of interactions between Buddhists in the seventeenth century.
Here, Townsend makes two significant contributions to the history of early modern Tibet. The first concerns the historiographical approach to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. So far, historiography has privileged Géluk monasticism, rigid sectarian divides, and tense hostility, ascribing much agency to the Mongols first and Manchu later. A history of Tibet in these centuries was synonymous to a history of Géluk school. Mindröling showcases how a Nyingma visionary crafted a unique institution in a time and a place where conditions were disadvantageous to non-Géluk Buddhists. But Terdak Lingpa accomplished more than reviving Nyingma practices under Géluk dominance. He played a crucial role in safeguarding the Fifth Dalai Lama’s nascent polity. Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso named Terdak Lingpa as his imperial preceptor shortly before he passed away in 1682; and after the Dalai Lama's death, Terdak Lingpa advised the regent in the fifteen years that elapsed before the news of the hierarch's departure was made public. This kind of nuanced historical analysis, when applied to the political core of the Lhasa government, helps explain how the Ganden Podrang operated internally. Tibetan history in these two centuries was far more than a story of Géluk’s association with the Mongols or the Manchus.
Townsend’s second contribution connects to the first one. Géluk supremacy produced historical narratives that overtly discussed sectarian tensions. According to this view, differences in practice and access to resources of all sorts ensured sectarian competitions, which were to be overturned in the nineteenth century by what is conventionally called “nonsectarian movement” (ris med). However, Townsend joins others in reappraising the movement or the concept altogether; instead, she considers Terdak Lingpa’s writings and Mindröling’s model to be foundational to the later more pronounced intellectual viewpoints. Terdak Lingpa’s approach to the unbiased Buddhist worldview also reserved space for women in both his family and Mindröling’s history; they were more than mere consorts and mothers supporting one’s religious practices.
Perhaps Terdak Lingpa’s most significant influence outlived him and continued to shape not only Nyingma practices outside Lhasa in later centuries but also the administration of the Buddhist government. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with Mindröling’s far-reaching impacts. Through a close reading of its “constitutional guidelines” (bca’ yig) and curriculum, Townsend discusses the blueprint developed by Terdak Lingpa for Nyingma monasteries in the new political reality defined by Géluk hegemony, and that was indeed a fine line to walk. Mindröling developed an integral curriculum to include secular topics, such as literary arts, astrology, and medicine, and it honed students’ expertise in tantric ritual performance while adhering to appropriate monastic vows, such as celibacy. Townsend tells us that other Nyingma monasteries outside Lhasa were inspired to develop or adopt a similar curriculum, yet one is left hoping to hear more about how branches and associated monasteries within this widespread network maintained their tie to the “mother monastery.” Monastic guidelines were certainly central to sustaining their connections, but how did Mindröling perceive its authority over these monasteries in the decades under discussion in this book? Or were the monasteries themselves that sought to connect with Mindröling, given its political and religious weight? Answers to these questions may help shed light on Mindröling’s influence outside the political core of the Ganden Podrang government and outside Lhasa.
The last two chapters also investigate a distinct student body, that of the Tibetan aristocrats, many of whom were aspiring bureaucrats hoping for a position in the Ganden Podrang government. One of them was Miwang Polhané, who ruled Tibet between 1728 and 1747 during the reign of the Seventh Dalai Lama and provided much-needed political stability in the otherwise precarious eighteenth century. What attracted them to Mindröling was its comprehensive curriculum and its attention to writing, a scholastic aspect that had been overtaken by reading and memorization skills at the Géluk monastic centers in Lhasa, since debates were more valued in these institutions. Children of Tibet’s upper echelons continued their aesthetic education at Mindröling in their formative years. Here, these lay aristocrats developed those tastes and skills that not only helped entrench their class hierarchies but also defined their worldview within a Buddhist framework or, as the title puts it, a “Buddhist sensibility.”
Townsend grounds her research in a trove of textual sources to tell both an institutional history of Mindröling and a social history of Tibet in the wake of the Géluk ascendance to dominance in the early modern time. For anyone interested in Tibetan Buddhism, the institutional history of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, women’s role in Tibetan history, or Tibetan history at the turn of the eighteenth century, A Buddhist Sensibility is a must-read.
Notes
[1]. Georges B. J. Dreyfus, The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); José Cabezón and Dorjee Penpa, Sera Monastery (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2019); Paul Nietupski, Labrang Monastery: A Tibetan Buddhist Community on the Inner Asian Borderlands, 1709-1958 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010); Berthe Jansen, The Monastery Rules: Buddhist Monastic Organization in Pre-Modern Tibet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); and Brenton Sullivan, Building a Religious Empire: Tibetan Buddhism, Bureaucracy, and the Rise of the Gélukpa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
[2]. Terdak Lingpa was not the only Nyingma Buddhist occupying an important role within the Géluk Buddhist government in these two decades. See Michael Monhart, “Seeing All as One, Mediating between Gods, Humans, and Demons: The Travels of Katok Tsewang Norbu 1749-1751” (master's thesis, Columbia University, 2011); and Jann Michael Ronis, “Celibacy, Revelations, and Reincarnated Lamas: Contestation and Synthesis in the Growth of Monasticism at Katok Monastery from the 17th through 19th Centuries” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2009).
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Citation:
Lan Wu. Review of Townsend, Dominique, A Buddhist Sensibility: Aesthetic Education at Tibet's Mindröling Monastery.
H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=57197
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