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U rgyan pa Rin chen dpal (1230-1309) was a great adept of the bKa' brgyud school of Tibetan Buddhism, particularly renowned for his knowledge of the Kālacakra tantra and the unique teaching known as the Approach and Attainment of the Three Vajras (rDo rje gsum gyi bsnyen sgrub), said to have been given to him in his vision by Vajrayoginī (rDo rje rnal 'byor ma) in the Miraculous Land (sprul pa'i zhing) of U rgyan. He was the student of the 2nd Karma pa, who entrusted him with the Black Hat, which he passed to the 3rd Karma pa. He was also a great traveller who journeyed widely across and beyond Tibet. He met Qubilai Khan in the capital of Yuan China and visited sacred Buddhist sites in South India. He has been aptly described by van der Kuijp as "the great Tibetan yogi, thaumaturge, scholar, alchemist, and traveler". Thanks to the availability of a large amount of hitherto unknown materials from eleven biographies, the thesis has put considerable weight on the bibliographical comparison and analysis of the different works in an attempt to establish the possible relationship between them. This is supplemented by summaries of the biographies, to give an overview of the protagonist's life in Part One of the thesis. Part Two consists of a critical study of the different phases and aspects of U rgyan pa's life in the unique historical, political and religious context of each phase, drawing materials from the corpus of biographies and in the light of other primary and secondary sources in Tibetan, Chinese and Western languages. In Chapter I, U rgyan pa's family lineage, childhood and early studies are discussed in order to find out how his innate propensities and early studies are represented as having influenced his character. In Chapter II, the account of U rgyan pa's journey to West Tibet and U rgyan is studied. A sixteen-stanza song in his own words epitomising this journey, supplemented by route maps, will be used as a framework to illustrate and reconstruct his journey to the Land of the Ḍākinīs. In Chapter III, the teachings he received and the subsequent transformation of his character and status, are explored. In Chapter IV, his career as a tantric master, his other pilgrimages and benediction trips, and his conflicts with various religious and political authorities, are examined. The materials will be scrutinised in the hope of separating as far as possible fact from fiction.

This thesis offers an exploration of how one brings a Tibetan sacred text to being - and to voice - in the unfamiliar, and perhaps unlikely, landscape of Northern California. Through 16 months' fieldwork with a Nyingma Buddhist community based in Berkeley, California I ask how the production of the sacred is undertaken here by American volunteers who are largely neophytes to Tibetan Buddhism. Against a backdrop of the history of Tibetan textual production - largely populated by masters, monastics, and artisans - I explore what kind of work (both physical and imaginative) American volunteers must undertake in order to render themselves effective creators of the sacred in this American industrial setting. Drawing on current research that explores the adaptive capacities of Tibetan Buddhist traditional practices, I will offer a new facet to this flexibility through an investigation of the ways these texts and their surrounding practices are creatively deployed to meet the needs of their American makers. In this work I follow the sacred objects through their entangled physical and social creation in the various branches of this California community, from the construction of spaces ripe for sacred work, through fundraising, printing, and finally to the distribution of texts to the Tibetan monastic community in Bodh Gaya, India. In the conclusion I return to the question of how an American volunteer becomes an effective creator of a Tibetan Buddhist sacred text in Berkeley California, contributing a unique and rich case to the study of diasporic Tibetan text production. Ultimately, I will demonstrate that the very practice of creating and deploying Tibetan sacred texts offers a frame through which volunteers come to re-interpret and re-shape their spatial and temporal landscape. This dissertation seeks to bridge often disparate fields of study, allowing encounters between (and contributions to) such bodies of work as: the anthropological study of making, craft, and innovation; media and religious practice; the affective temporality of sacred relics; and the cross-culturally unique, agentive qualities of books.

The religions in Taiwan are diverse. Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity are the major religions in Taiwan. These religions are also close with Taiwan society and people life. Since the training and education of religion manpower is the critical effect to religions development, this study uses document analysis to investigate the development of major religions and the training and education of religion manpower (including missionary, professional, academic, and general knowledge) in Taiwan for the purpose of understanding existing conditions and problems. In addition, this study uses in-depth interviews and questionnaires to investigate the training and education of Dzongsar Institute. This study tries to give reference to Taiwan via comparing the training and education between Taiwan religions and Dzongsar Institute. The results indicate that since the difference of environments and development between Taiwan religions and Dzongsar Institute, the orientation between Taiwan religions and Dzongsar Institute is also different. The religions in Taiwan are diverse and the religions in Taiwan should tie with the development of Taiwan for improving the development of religions. In the other hand, Dzongsar Institute sets at a single religion environment and has no visible competition so Dzongsar Institute could to its best to develop Tibetan Buddhism and foster the manpower. Moreover, there are different training and education of missionary, profession, academy, and general knowledge between Taiwan religions and Dzongsar Institute. Summary, Taiwan religions are developed in training and education of missionary, academy, and general knowledge but should improve in professional training and education. On the other hand, Dzongsar Institute is not developed in training and education of missionary, academy, and general knowledge but is developed in professional training and education. Therefore, this study suggests enhancing the depth of professional training and education and improving the courses and contents of professional training and education in Taiwan religions.

This study explored how Tibetan refugee women have coped with the possible trauma they experienced in Tibet and when escaping from Tibet. It also examined how these women envisioned peace between Tibet and China and what meanings they constructed about the violence they may have experienced.Twelve Tibetan refugee women were interviewed in New York City. They came from all three regions of Tibet and their mean age was 35.5 years old. Only two participants were fluent in English. A qualitative semi-structured interview was employed to understand participants' unique experiences with past trauma and any continued repercussions. The interviews also assessed how participants envisioned peace between China and Tibet and if they believed peace was at all possible. An interpreter assisted with all the interviews.The data were analyzed using grounded theory methodology; with the help of two research assistants. This methodology offered the best opportunity to investigate the participants' understandings of their experiences and their beliefs. Using the constant comparative method, the results revealed the role of participants' religion, their belief in karma, and communal support as keys in their adjustment and mental health. Additionally, the women reported feelings of loss, fear, and loneliness, but not anger or hostility. The participants also revealed, however, feelings of relief and safety leaving the threat of imprisonment or torture behind in Tibet. Further, the women expressed feelings of appreciation for their freedom and their ability to hope for a better future for themselves and their families.The results suggested that there are some specific cultural variables that helped these Tibetan refugee women navigate the course of leaving Tibet and moving to a new country. Additional studies are needed to more fully comprehend the effects of trauma on the migration of Tibetan refugee women. Such studies can help further explain the relationship between trauma and culture-bound expressions of distress. Other implications (e.g., provision of services) of the current findings are discussed, as are several limitations to the study. / Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance Services

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 247-258).

This dissertation provides a comprehensive description of the tonal and intonational phonology of Lhasa Tibetan (LT) in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. It is based on recorded data elicited from members of the Tibetan-Canadian community in Ottawa and Toronto. The first two chapters of the dissertation contain background information about LT, a summary of previous research on LT tones and intonation, and an overview of the theoretical framework and conceptual tools used in the rest of the dissertation. The third chapter deals with word tonology. I establish that the prosodic structure of LT brings evidence for four main constituents at or below the word level: a) the mora encodes vowel length contrasts, b) the syllable is the tone-bearing unit (TBU), c) the prosodic word, which is maximally binary, delimits the application of most tonal processes, and d) the prosodic word group, which matches grammatical words, is the domain of downstep. This prosodic structure provides evidence against the universality of the Prosodic Hierarchy (Selkirk, 2002; Nespor and Vogel, 2007) in that it has no phonological phrase, but has two word-level constituents. I then argue that LT has three lexical tones (H, LH, and L) – L being limited to some suffixes – and propose that these lexical tones are subject to tone rules applying within the prosodic word and the prosodic word group. These tone rules are similar to those proposed by Duanmu (1992), but have been improved to accurately predict the tone patterns of long polysyllabic words. Based on phonetic evidence, I also come to the conclusion that LT no longer has stress, and that the stress pattern found in other Bodic varieties has been reinterpreted as a part of the tonal system. The fourth chapter analyses phrasal prosody. I argue that LT forms intonational phrases around clauses and marks them with final lengthening, pitch reset, and a limited set of boundary tones (H% and L%). Although communicative functions and information structure are mostly realized by means of final particles and morphosyntactic devices in LT, I show that boundary tones, focal tones, and deaccenting interact with word tones to form complex melodic patterns. In the fifth chapter, I present a phonologically-based F0 synthesis model to verify the adequacy of the proposed Autosegmental-Metrical model of LT. This F0 synthesis model consists of three main components: a) the tonal targets de ned in previous chapters, b) an F0 interpolation component based on the PENTA model (Xu, 2004), and c) an evaluation component allowing a comparison of the F0 contours of real LT utterances with resynthesized F0 contours of the same utterances. The F0 synthesis model is able to generate F0 contours that approximate the F0 contours of real LT recordings, suggesting that the proposed phonological model adequately captures the overall tonal and intonational phonology of LT.

The culminating philosophy and practice for Buddhist traditions in Tibet is what is found in tantra, or Vajrayāna. Yet Tibet is unique in the Buddhist world in that it is a place where not only the traditions of tantra are practiced, but where the epistemological traditions of valid cognition and what came to be known as Prāsangika-Madhyamaka also took root. This chapter briefly surveys a range of ways in which Madhyamaka is represented in Tibet. Madhyamaka takes the place of the highest philosophical view among Tibetan Buddhist sects, and seeing how different traditions formulate the view of Madhyamaka is an important part of understanding how these traditions relate to tantra and negotiate the relationship between Madhyamaka and Vajrayāna. Vajrayāna in Tibet is pantheist to the core, for, in its most profound expressions all dualities between the divine and the world are radically undone.

The culminating philosophy and practice for Buddhist traditions in Tibet is what is found in tantra, or Vajrayāna. Yet Tibet is unique in the Buddhist world in that it is a place where not only the traditions of tantra are practiced, but where the epistemological traditions of valid cognition and what came to be known as Prāsangika-Madhyamaka also took root. This chapter briefly surveys a range of ways in which Madhyamaka is represented in Tibet. Madhyamaka takes the place of the highest philosophical view among Tibetan Buddhist sects, and seeing how different traditions formulate the view of Madhyamaka is an important part of understanding how these traditions relate to tantra and negotiate the relationship between Madhyamaka and Vajrayāna. Vajrayāna in Tibet is pantheist to the core, for, in its most profound expressions all dualities between the divine and the world are radically undone.