Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro

Amazon.com Price: $37.32 (as of 10/11/2019 17:39 PST- Details)

Description

Love and Liberation reads the autobiographical and biographical writings of one of the crucial few Tibetan Buddhist women to record the story of her life. Sera Khandro Künzang Dekyong Chönyi Wangmo (also known as Dewé Dorjé, 1892–1940) used to be strange not only for achieving religious mastery as a Tibetan Buddhist visionary and guru to many lamas, monastics, and laity within the Golok region of eastern Tibet, but also for her candor. This book listens to Sera Khandro’s conversations with land deities, dakinis, bodhisattvas, lamas, and fellow religious community members whose voices interweave with her own to narrate what is a story of both love between Sera Khandro and her guru, Drimé Özer, and religious liberation.

Sarah H. Jacoby’s analysis makes a speciality of the status of the female body in Sera Khandro’s texts, the virtue of celibacy as opposed to the expediency of sexuality for religious purposes, and the difference between profane lust and sacred love between female and male tantric partners. Her findings add new dimensions to our understanding of Tibetan Buddhist consort practices, complicating standard scriptural presentations of male subject and female aide. Sera Khandro depicts herself and Drimé Özer as inseparable embodiments of insight and method that together form the Vajrayana Buddhist vision of complete buddhahood. By advancing this complementary sacred partnership, Sera Khandro carved a spot for herself as a female virtuoso within the male-dominated sphere of early twentieth-century Tibetan religion.

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Engineering and Transportation » Engineering » Reference » Atlases and Maps » World » Women in History » Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro

Recent Products