Celebrating Janet Gyatso

I’m delighted to announce the publication of Living Treasure: Buddhist and Tibetan Studies in Honor of Janet Gyatso, a set of 29 essays celebrating the life and research of my graduate school mentor and longtime friend Janet Gyatso.

This is one of those projects started before the pandemic that took several years to come to fruition. The essays are brilliant and align with Janet’s major interests in her career: Women, Gender, and Sexuality; Biography and Autobiography; the Nyingma Imaginaire; Literature, Arts, and Poetry; and Early Modernity: Human and Nonhuman Worlds. Order through Wisdom Publications.

It was a delight to work with Andy Quintman on this. Last July in Prague, at the Sixteenth Seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, we had a party for friends of Janet and contributors to the anthology.

“When wonder adorns wonder, Tibetan nomads sing: ‘Were I to heighten a high thing with something high,/ With clouds I would heighten the collar of the blue sky.’ Here is a heaped cloud offering of essays by distinguished scholars in honor of Janet Gyatso. Plumbing the extraordinary depths of Tibetan language, she has been revealing the riches and wisdom of Tibetan civilization in all its myriad complexities over a lifetime.”—Lama Jabb, author of Oral and Literary Continuities in Modern Tibetan Literature: The Inescapable Nation

“Janet Gyatso truly is a living treasure. She is an inspiration for scholarly excellence in the fascinating dimensions represented in this book—studies in Tibetan literature, the Nyingma tradition, gender and sexuality in Buddhism, early modernity, the more-than-human world, and so much more. But beyond this, she is an example of how to live a life dedicated to intellectual precision, far-ranging curiosity, and wholehearted mentorship.”—Sarah H. Jacoby, author of Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro

“Through the works she has written, the courses she has taught, and the scholars she has mentored, Janet Gyatso has transformed the field of Tibetan Buddhist studies, as the essays in this volume so eloquently attest.”—Donald S. Lopez Jr., Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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