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See Things as They Really Are: Poetry & the Bardo of Dreams
02/07/2020 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
The Columbia University Buddhist Studies Seminar would like to invite you to the following talk:
See Things as They Really Are: Poetry & the Bardo of Dreams
Speaker: Dr. Dominique Townsend
Abstract:
What is the relationship between Tibetan poetic language and Buddhist awakening? Is the composition and enjoyment of poetry a distraction from Buddhist practice? In this talk I’ll consider the connections between Indo-Tibetan Buddhist poetics and practices designed to cultivate enlightenment in the in-between or bardo states of consciousness. To do so, I’ll analyze a set of eighteenth century poetic instructions for lucid dreaming from the Great Perfection tradition, composed in metered verse. The instructions claim to provide the complete means for liberation in just one Tibetan page, front and back. The brevity of the instructions works together with apophatic language and a reconciling of uncertainty to spark full awakening through the act of dreaming. I will present a translation of the instructions and reflect on the relationship between the poem’s form and its soteriological intentions.
About the Speaker:
Dominique Townsend is Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies at Bard College. Her research focuses on Buddhist aesthetics and cultural production. Columba University Press will publish her book A Buddhist Sensibility: Aesthetics and Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Tibet in 2020. Townsend’s current research involves Tibetan poetics and the question of whether reading and writing poetry has soteriological value according to Tibetan Buddhist thinkers.
For directions to the Faculty House, see the following PDF: http://facultyhouse.columbia.edu/files/facultyhouse/web/Faculty_House_Directions.pdf
Information about the Columbia University Buddhist Studies Seminar: http://universityseminars.columbia.edu/seminars/buddhist-studies/
More information about the Columbia Center for Buddhism and East Asian Religion (C-BEAR) can be found at: http://www.c-bear.org
