Histories of Tibet

The thirty-four essays in this volume follow the particular interests of Leonard van der Kuijp, whose groundbreaking research in Tibetan intellectual and cultural history imbued his students with an abiding sense of curiosity and discovery.

As part of Leonard van der Kuijp’s research in Tibetan history, as he patiently and expertly revealed treasures of the Tibetan intellectual tradition in fourteenth-century Tsang, or seventeenth-century Lhasa, or eighteenth-century Amdo, he developed an international community of colleagues and students. The thirty-four essays in this volume follow the particular interests of the honoree and express the comprehensive research that his international cohort have engaged in alongside his generous tutelage over the course of forty years. He imbued his students with the abiding sense of curiosity and discovery that can be experienced through every one of his writings, and that can be found as well in these new essays in intellectual, cultural, and institutional history by Christopher Beckwith, the late Hubert Decleer, Franz-Karl Ehrhard, Jörg Heimbel and David Jackson, Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy, Nathan Hill, Matthew Kapstein, Kurtis Schaeffer, Michael Witzel, Allison Aitken, Yael Bentor, Pieter Verhagen, Todd Lewis, William McGrath, Peter Schwieger, Gray Tuttle, and others.

Kurtis R. Schaeffer is the Frances Myers Ball Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, where he co-directs the Tibetan Studies Program. He was a student of Leonard van der Kuijp at Harvard from 1991 to 2000. His books include Himalayan Hermitess (2004), Dreaming the Great Brahmin (2005; derived from his PhD dissertation, supervised by van der Kuijp), The Culture of the Book in Tibet (2009), An Early Tibetan Catalogue of Buddhist Literature (with Leonard van der Kuijp), and The Life of the Buddha by Tenzin Chögyel (2015). His edited volumes include Among Tibetan Texts: History and Literature of the Tibetan Plateau by E. Gene Smith (2000), Power, Politics and the Reinvention of Tradition with Bryan J. Cuevas (2006), Sources of Tibetan Tradition with Matthew T. Kapstein and Gray Tuttle (2013), and The Tibetan History Reader with Gray Tuttle (2013). His interests include the cultural and literary history of Tibet.