Dominique Townsend, "A Buddhist sensibility : aesthetic education at Tibet’s Mindröling Monastery," (Columbia University Press, 2021)

Founded in 1676 during a cosmopolitan early modern period, Mindroling monastery became a key site for Buddhist education and a Tibetan civilizational center. Its founders sought to systematize and institutionalize a worldview rooted in Buddhist philosophy, engaging with contemporaries from across Tibetan Buddhist schools while crystallizing what it meant to be part of their own Nyingma school. At the monastery, ritual performance, meditation, renunciation, and training in the skills of a bureaucrat or member of the literati went hand in hand. Studying at Mindrling entailed training the senses and cultivating the objects of the senses through poetry, ritual music, monastic dance, visual arts, and incense production, as well as medicine and astrology.Dominique Townsend investigates the ritual, artistic, and cultural practices inculcated at Mindrling to demonstrate how early modern Tibetans integrated Buddhist and worldly activities through training in aesthetics. Considering laypeople as well as monastics and women as well as men, A Buddhist Sensibility sheds new light on the forms of knowledge valued in early modern Tibetan societies, especially among the ruling classes. Townsend traces how tastes, values, and sensibilities were cultivated and spread, showing what it meant for a person, lay or monastic, to be deemed well educated. Combining historical and literary analysis with fieldwork in Tibetan Buddhist communities, this book reveals how monastic institutions work as centers of cultural production beyond the boundaries of what is conventionally deemed Buddhist. Mindröling monastery Tibetan Buddhism Early modern Tibet Buddhist education Nyingma school Buddhist philosophy Tibetan civilizational centers Dominique Townsend A Buddhist Sensibility Ritual and cultural practices in Tibetan monasteries Buddhist aesthetics and sensory training Tibetan monastic dance and ritual music Buddhist arts and cultural production Integration of Buddhist and worldly activities Tibetan monastic education and literati training Laypeople and monastic education in Tibet Early modern Tibetan knowledge systems Buddhism and cultural production in Tibet Tibetan Buddhist institutions and aesthetics Dominique Townsend Columbia University Modern Tibetan Studies Modern Tibetan Studies East Asian Studies Podcast East Asian Studies Tibetan Studies Tibetan Literature Tibetan History Nyingma