[Asia_news] REMINDER: Faculty of Asian Studies Seminar- Friday 20th October

[amy holmes]

    REMINDER NOTICE
   
  CENTRE FOR ASIA SOCIETIES AND HISTORIES, FACULTY OF ASIAN STUDIES- POSTGRADUATE SEMINAR

2pm, Friday 20th October, W120 (Ground Floor), Baldessin Precinct Building (Faculty of Asian Studies/ Linguistics Building)

Pre- Fieldwork Seminar

Amy Holmes- The Making of a Meditation Master: Charisma, Memory and Eremitic Counterculture

This seminar will be based on my PhD thesis proposal, which outlines a project that will explore non-institutional Meditation Masters (known an Ngagpa or Gomchen), a category of practitioners in Tibetan Buddhism that have not previously been researched in any depth. This thesis will consider how these Meditation Masters become renowned as such, arguing that it is not only through esoteric practices, but through a multi-staged process, including recognition by a community, the development of lineages and hagiographies, and eventually the creation of an institution around the practitioner’s memory that leads them to become implanted within historic consciousness. 
These figures are often considered peripheral and dissident from the mainstream religious community in Tibet, due to their eremitic and often non-celibate lifestyles, as well as unconventional behaviour that. Perceiving Meditation Masters as leaders of popular religious countercultural movements and engaged in social contexts is a break away from our conventional perception of hermits as figures remote from the world, but brings a new depth to their importance in religious culture. However, in order for their lineages to survive, Meditation Masters are eventually incorporated into institutions. 
This incorporation takes place through the creation of a Memory of this figure in particular types of historical consciousness, such as hagiography, the use of relics, and the recognition of sacred places. These created memories are used in order for these initially revolutionary figures to be legitimized and gain recognition in wider religious society, as they become incorporated into larger, often monastic orders. 
Prior to this, the non-institutional practitioners can be therefore perceived as ‘subaltern’, in that from their position on the periphery of society their voices are rarely heard. In this aspect, this these will also serve as an attempt to suggest an aspect of the ‘subaltern’ history of Tibet, as previously studies have ignored these unorganised and therefore unseen communities. Here the emphasis comes away from the monasteries, and into the encampments of hilly ravines aims to provide a more balanced perspective, and importantly see the crucial part that these popular movements have played in the development of Tibetan Buddhist schools and lineages as we know them today. 
This project will focus on a central figure, Togden Shakya Shri (1853- 1919) and his students in order to highlight some of these issues, and bring Meditation Masters out from the mists of memories and myth and recognise their function as revolutionary and revitalising figures in Tibetan Buddhism. This will be shown through an exploration of the development of the history of a countercultural movement and its ultimate institutionalisation, or in Weber’s terms, the ‘routinization’ of ‘charismatic’ power.


 Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com