Collections of Songs (mgur ‘bum)
By taking a bird’s-eye view of collections of songs (mgur ‘bum), Kurtis Schaeffer (University of Virginia) and Andrew Quintman (Wesleyan) examine gaps in our knowledge based on the extant collections and their experiences both as translators and as historians of literature. They elicit an exploratory discussion by beginning with a series of key questions and positing ways in which we can think about songs as an autonomous literary form as well as how we might approach the provenance of songs and the process of their production and reproduction from the standpoint of history, in addition to other stimulating topics. What were the earliest song collections (mgur ‘bum)? When did they appear and how were they constituted? What are non-Kagyu examples of such collections?
Event: Lotsawa Translation Workshop – Breakout Session
Date: October 7, 2018 – 11:00 am
Speakers: Andrew Quintmen, Kurtis Schaeffer
Topics: Poetry, Tibetan Language, Translation, Transmission
Kurtis Schaeffer
University of Virginia
Kurtis R. Schaeffer is the Frances Myers Ball Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is a student of the literary history and culture of Tibet, with a particular interest in poetry, life writing, narrative, and contemplative literature from across the Tibetan plateau. His books include Himalayan Hermitess: The Life of a Tibetan Buddhist Nun; The Culture of the Book in Tibet, and (with Matthew Kapstein and Gray Tuttle) Sources of Tibetan Tradition, which is the largest anthology of Tibetan Buddhist literature in translation to date. Most recently he published The Life of the Buddha in the Penguin Classics series, which includes a translation of a beautiful Bhutanese story of the Buddha from Bhutan’s golden age of literature. He is currently finishing a translation of select works of Tibetan meditation literature, also for the Penguin Classics series.
Andrew Quintman
Wesleyan University
Andrew Quintman is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Wesleyan University, where he specializes in the Buddhist traditions of Tibet and the Himalaya. His book The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa (Columbia University Press, 2014) won the American Academy of Religion’s 2014 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, the 2015 Heyman Prize for outstanding scholarship from Yale University, and received honorable mention for the 2016 Association of Asian Studies’ E. Gene Smith Book Prize. His English translation of The Life of Milarepa was published by Penguin Classics in 2010. He is currently writing a history of Drakar Taso Monastery in Tibet’s southern frontier and a study of the Buddha’s life story through Tāranātha's visual and literary materials from Puntsokling Monastery in western Tibet.
