W&M Featured Events
[PAST EVENT] The Dalai Lama’s Secret Library: What Can Newly Discovered Texts Tell Us about Religious Traditions?
Access & Features
- Open to the public
The recent recovery of thousands of volumes of Buddhist texts from the personal library of the 5th Dalai Lama has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of Tibetan Buddhism. We now have access to many of the foundational figures of one of the world’s major branches of Buddhism. This discovery raises important questions about the formation and development of religious traditions and how knowledge is disseminated within them, starting with the most basic: why was this library assembled? and why, upon Tibetans’ exile from their homeland, was it left behind? Prof. Vose will present material from his forthcoming book, Splitting the Middle: A Natural History of Middle Way Reasoning, which utilizes several manuscripts from this library to shed light on the creation of Tibetan Buddhism’s “Middle Way” philosophy.
Sponsored by: Programming Committee