Buddhist Minds and Bodies: Essays in Honor of Jose Ignacio Cabezon - Paperback

by Rory Lindsay (Editor), Vesna Wallace (Editor)

Students and admirers of Jose Ignacio Cabezon pay tribute with this collection of thirty diverse essays on the study of religion. Centered on Buddhism and Tibet, contributors also uncover insights about missionaries, Muslims, and Mongolia.

As the Fourteenth Dalai Lama Chair of Buddhist Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, a past president of the American Academy of Religion, and a prolific author of watershed books, Jose Cabezon has left an indelible mark on the discipline of religious studies. A refugee from Cuba who was brought to the US as a child, he trained both as a monk in the Tibetan Buddhist system and as a scholar at the University of Wisconsin. From his earliest publications, he has demonstrated the breadth of his interests and expertise, from philosophy, exegesis, and translation, to history, sexuality, and comparative religion, spanning centuries and sects, and interrogating hidden assumptions within the field.

The present volume honors that broad legacy in similarly diverse fashion. Thirty fellow scholars, both peers and former students, explore a rich array of topics inspired by Cabezon's seminal contributions and scholarly collegiality. Whether it is the intersection of queer theory with Madhyamaka philosophy, Jesuit engagement with Tibetan scholasticism, shifting mores around selling religious objects in Tibet, the religious identity of Tibetan women who travel beyond death, or the fate of Tibetan Muslims in exile, the articles collected here will intrigue even as they expand our knowledge of the diverse ways that Tibetan religion and Buddhist practice has manifested, both historically and in the present day.

Includes essays by Dan Arnold, Douglas Duckworth, Baatra Erdene-Ochir, Jed Forman, Jay L. Garfield, John Powers, Michael J. Sweet, Sonam Thakchoe, Sara McClintock, Trent Pomplun, Georges Dreyfus, Alyson Prude, Bryan J. Cuevas, Roger R. Jackson, Adam C. Krug, Michael R. Sheehy, John Newman, Vesna Wallace, Rae Erin Dachille, Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp, Nancy G. Lin, Matthew W. King, Leonard Zwilling, Nathaniel Rich, Alex Catanese, William Dewey, James Gentry, Rohit Singh, Rory Lindsay, and Francis Clooney.

Author Biography

Rory Lindsay is an assistant professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Trained at Harvard University, he is also an editor at 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha.

Vesna A. Wallace is a distinguished university professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches South Asian and Inner Asian religions and advanced Sanskrit.

Jose Ignacio Cabezon (author of Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism and co-author of Freedom from Extremes) was co-chair of the Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism series from 2005 to 2022. He is XIVth Dalai Lama Professor of Tibetan Buddhism and Cultural Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. Cabezón studied physics as an undergraduate at Caltech, trained as a monk at Sera Monastery in India, and translated for the Dalai Lama into Spanish on several occasions. He earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1987. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books on Indo-Tibetan scholasticism, Madhyamaka philosophy, Buddhism and sexuality, and Tibetan ritual. His co-authored Sera Monastery, also published by Wisdom, is a history of one of the great monastic universities of Tibet from its founding to the present. Cabezón served as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2020.