A Buddhist Sensibility

Founded in 1676, Mindröling monastery became a key site for Buddhist education and a Tibetan civilizational center. Dominique Townsend investigates the ritual, artistic, and cultural practices inculcated at Mindröling to demonstrate how early modern Tibetans integrated Buddhist and worldly activities through training in aesthetics.

Dominique Townsend is assistant professor of Buddhist studies at Bard College. She is also a poet and the author of Shantideva: How to Wake Up a Hero (2015), a book about Buddhism for children and families.

Janet Gyatso, author of Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet:
This book focuses upon a remarkable monastic institution in the early modern period and shows how it shaped the cosmopolitanism of the Tibetan capital and its aristocracy. Townsend provides fascinating case studies of letter-writing, monastic curricula, and belle lettres, developing a special understanding of literature and aesthetics as ethically significant and religiously coded. The book serves to adjust our understanding of just what the category of “Buddhism,” or even “Buddhist institution” – or even “monastery” – could and should denote, and troubles forever more any strict boundary between religion and secular life in Tibetan Buddhist society.