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Next week, the Center for Asian Studies is pleased to collaborate with the Tsadra "Translation and Transmission" Conference to bring Andrew Quintman of Yale University to CU Boulder on Wednesday, October 1, to deliver a lecture on "The Making of Milarepa: Reading and Writing the Life of Tibet's Great Saint."

Late in the eleventh century a wandering mendicant, the Yogin, starved himself in the frigid mountains of southern Tibet while undertaking ascetic practice. He was later recognized as a buddha famed for his poetry and songs of spiritual realization. Four hundred years later, a tantric adept emerged from the jungles of Tibet’s borderlands, naked, human entrails wound in his dangling dreadlocks. This adept, the Madman, composed a new and novelistic version of the Yogin’s life. The story it told of a great Tibetan saint would inspire new forms of religious literature across the Himalayan world, new styles of artistic production, new traditions of spiritual practice. In time, the Madman’s version of the Yogin’s life would become Tibet’s most famous book. In this lecture, Andrew Quintman explores the extraordinary life story of Yogin Milarepa composed by Madman Tsangnyön Heruka, tracing its historical formation, changing narrative voices, and enduring legacy across the region. Drawing on his recent book, The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa, he presents a new way of reading The Life of Milarepa by foregrounding the unique relationship between Yogin and Madman together with the processes through which the narrative took shape.

There will be a reception with Professor Quintman before his lecture at 3:30 p.m. at the CU Art Museum. In tandem with his lecture, the CU Art Museum will be hosting an art exhibit by the Lhasa artist Gade on the theme of "pechas" or Tibetan texts, in which Gade creates surreal modern landscapes on traditional manuscript paper. Prior to the lecture, at 4:30 p.m., anyone is invited to visit the third floor of Norlin Library for a tour of our library display on Tibetan textual production and its translation and transmission to the West. The lecture takes place in the British Studies Room on the fifth floor of Norlin. The lecture will take place at 5:00 p.m. in the British Studies Room on the 5th floor of Norlin Library. It is free and open to the public.

Andrew Quintman is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University, specializing in the Buddhist traditions of Tibet and the Himalaya. His areas of teaching and research include Buddhist literature and history, sacred geography and pilgrimage, and visual cultures of the wider Himalayan region. He is author of The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa (Columbia University Press, 2014) and translator of the new English translation of The Life of Milarepa, published by Penguin Classics in 2010.

These events celebrate the Tsadra "Translation and Transmission" Conference in Keystone, Colorado on October 2-5, 2014.