Sarah Jacoby, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Northwestern University

ACLS Project Title: Self, Society, and Sentiment in the Auto/biographical Writings of a Tibetan

Female Visionary

Tentative Book Title: Love and Liberation in the Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Visionary Sera Khandro, Columbia UP, under contract, expected 2014

Sera Khandro Dewé Dorjé, 1892-1940

So What?

• The “Narrative Identity Thesis”:– “Each of us constructs and lives a ‘narrative,’

and that this narrative is us, our identities.” (Oliver Sacks, The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat)– “Narrative, rather than referring to ‘reality,’

may in fact create or constitute it.” (Jerome Bruner, "The Narrative Construction of Reality”)

Amnyé Machen Mountain

20,605 ft.

GOLOK TIBETAN AUTONOMOUS PREFECTURE, QINGHAI PROVINCE, PRC

European Exceptionalism on Autobiography

• “Moreover, it would seem that autobiography is not to be found outside of our cultural area; one would say that it expresses a concern peculiar to Western man, a concern that has been of good use in his systematic conquest of the universe and that he has communicated to men of other cultures.”

(Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” 1956)

European Exceptionalism on Passionate Love

• “we should expect to find the origins—or at least the intensification—of romantic love in the rise of the individual in the ‘West.’” (Robert Solomon, Love: Emotion, Myth, & Metaphor, 1990)

• William Reddy finds the opposition between desire “conceived of as an appetite” and true love “conceived of as selfless care and devotion to another” as “unique to Western conceptions and practices.” (Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love, 2012)

Hayagrīva and Vajravārāhī

Insight (Sanskrit prajnā, Tibetan shes rab)

And skillful means (Skt. upāya, Tib. thabs shes) , also called compassion (Skt. karuṇā, Tib. snying rje)

Drimé Özer and Sera Khandro

The Buddhist Doctrine of Interdependence

• “When this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases.” Samyutta-nikāya (II, 28)