One sign of the impact of the turn to the vernacular across the humanities has been the modest explosion, in Tibetan studies, of scholarship on autobiographical writing. Not that these texts are necessarily written in a vernacular dialect, strictly speaking, although quite a few of them are. I mean, in this instance, rather that the kind of scholarship that is now being carried out in the study of Tibetan auto/biography (often the two genres cannot be fully separated) endeavors to appreciate the idiosyncratic textures of everyday human life and values. This is a noticeable shift from the more traditional habits in Tibetology to read literature normatively—to establish a critical edition, or to cull and describe Buddhist doctrine, or to cull historical facts. Another kind of metric to assess such a development might be described as the distinction between writing about said values representationally—that is, as a set of items that constitute a description of Tibetan culture or another such construct viewed objectively—and writing from a perspective that is located most centrally in the humanities, by which I mean to say a scholarly stance located, somehow, with or within the material. The latter is hard to do well without sacrificing a critical gaze and a responsible historiography, but when it happens the resulting book makes for a great read, even for those with next to no knowledge of things Tibetan.

For me, the gold standard for the latter kind of approach to Tibetan autobiography would be to read such works as a literary critic, who does not have to assume that the protagonist or the story represents anything at all, and rather engages with the material in service of finding something human. This would entail close reading of the text's rhetorical qualities: its ironies, devices, innuendos, self-referencings, emplotments, opacities. The reason for detecting such things would be to discover something familiar, or unfamiliar, or funny, or personally meaningful, or sad, rather than something Tibetan, or Buddhist, or Tantric, and so on. It would also be to avoid what is sometimes called the functionalist fallacy: the idea that something is created intentionally in order to serve a rational, if not instrumental, social agenda. And most of all, such scholarship would be recognizable and appealing and meaningful to readers beyond those interested in Tibet; just as we in Tibetan studies take ideas and insights from contemporary philosophy or cultural studies or history that can shed light on our work, people in Western theory, or literature, or even just Asian studies more broadly, would find something in our work that would shed light on theirs. Now this latter desideratum has rarely, if ever been realized. How many times have we ever seen something in Tibetan studies quoted by someone outside, say, Tibetan studies and cognate areas of Buddhist studies, Sinology, and Indology? But just because such participation in a broader intellectual universe has yet to take place in any sustained way in Tibetan studies does not mean that we are not on the road to it. The recent fine books on Tibetan auto/biography reviewed in this short essay all open doors, in a range of directions, to new futures on the field's intellectual horizons.

Carl Yamamoto's study of Lama Zhang (1123–93), a major teacher and writer and one of Central Tibet's earliest religious political leaders, is more than about auto/biographical writing. It is also about understanding the man, and the reception of his auto/biographies, and the formation of cultural and political values in the twelfth century. But it ventures principles and patterns that could plausibly be importable to different periods and places, if not outside the Tibetan cultural sphere entirely. In getting to such principles Yamamoto seems intimately aware of the pitfalls of representation. He is mostly bent on one person and one moment, albeit one that, as he puts it beautifully, was “so in tune with the hidden hand of history that a seemingly trivial decision can be seen in retrospect to have had very large consequences” (p. 195). Thus while the project overall is indeed about culling historical information, Yamamoto proceeds with a rich and expansive vision that is not after mere pieces of information, but rather the way that pieces fall into place. In this he is aware of the fallacy of assuming intentionality. At one point he is discussing how Lama Zhang's appointment by his teacher to restore the major temples of Lhasa and to become a “protector of beings” (a general term thick with Buddhist ethical connotations) took on a political dimension. He writes, “It is easy to see how the original religious commitment quickly entails a host of other commitments that may not have seemed, at first glance, to be part of the job description” (p. 198). In other words, religious ideology is not necessarily the reason for what people do, a point that Tibetan studies as a whole would do well to take in.

Yamamoto's self-consciousness of his historiography is evident in his careful attention to his own usage of key terms. One of these is “charisma,” an obvious choice for Lama Zhang's power and which for Yamamoto has particularly to do with the ability to create order and structure. Another is “hegemony,” and he makes important distinctions regarding the Gramscian tradition in which hegemony has to do with the articulation of cultural values rather than domination per se. Most of all the word “style” is important to Yamamoto's analysis, for which he identifies several possible Tibetan analogous concepts and introduces a distinction from what he would call “system.” This evokes for me the French Annales school's sense of the difference between “mentalité” and “ideology,” terminology that Yamamoto does not take up but that might have been useful to the analysis too.

Yamamoto argues that we need to draw on a range of genres beyond autobiography and biography, including eulogies, supplications, instructions, and lists of teachings, in order to get the fullest sense of the man and his times. Particularly welcome is one section of the book that draws out Zhang's “stylistic palette” (pp. 131–37), including his provocative uses of repetition and rhythm. In order to help the reader understand the rich range of voices of this extraordinary writer, Yamamoto even ingeniously connects Zhang's creative style to the Lotus Sutra's famous injunctions regarding skillful means to teach beings. He also provides translations of two interesting texts of self-criticism, one of which Yamamoto plausibly postulates, contra previous scholarship, was written in an ironic voice by Zhang himself. Yamamoto also struggles to deal with the apparent contradiction in another work between the simultaneous praise and blame of its imputed protagonist, leaving any determination of authorship inconclusive.

A principal argument of the book is that auto/biographical writing was not merely an instrument of self-promotion but also served to create lineages and practice communities. Perhaps due to the lack of clear evidence of Zhang's authorship of the intriguing self-criticisms, as well as the undecidability of his authorial stance in another text of self-eulogy, the book demurs from a full rhetorical analysis of Zhang's writing. It also seems to leave aside a third possible function of autobiographical writing—in my view the most interesting, namely self-expression as such, which may indeed not be a “function” at all—rather than the more instrumental aims of self- or lineage-promotion.Footnote ¹ But the book displays clear sympathy with the subject throughout, along with a desire to give an account of the processes of community and value formation. This is especially evident in Yamamoto's explicit vindication of Lama Zhang, contra his reputation in previous Western scholarship as a threat to civil order or even a psychopath. As a telling sign of the sensitivity of his historiographical stance, Yamamoto was first prompted to propose a different reading from his predecessors when he discerned the “rough and affectionate relationship … between Lama Zhang and the First Karmapa—a respectable figure if there ever was one” (xii; cf. 246–51).

Vision and Violence includes a slew of useful appendices, such as a detailed listing of contents and colophons of the nine-volume collected works of Lama Zhang. I have only one small complaint regarding the index, where quite a few entries seem to point to the wrong page numbers.

Benjamin Bogin tracks different kinds of boundary-crossings between autobiography and other cultural formations in his beautiful book on the life of the Great Yolmowa III (1598–1644). Yolmowa was a Buddhist teacher who also had connections to the Tibetan capital, this time from an area now in northern Nepal. Bogin rises to a humanistic register in his study of Yolmowa's work by highlighting first and foremost the stunning, self-illustrated autobiography, replete with charming painted images and captions, in favor of another, much longer, self-written rendition of the life entirely in words. Bogin recognizes the premier value of these unusual images, not just to demonstrate the fact that Tibetans can paint their lives as well as tell them verbally, but also—and seemingly primarily—simply for their delight on their own terms. Thus does The Illuminated Life of the Great Yolmowa reproduce all of the forty-four illustrations, greatly aided by Serindia's long experience with Tibetan painting. Bogin supplies his own art-historical comments on each image, offering, for example, interesting insights on the relative size of various figures, sometimes in tension with what the written words say. The book also provides a translation of all the images' captions; a translation of the much-longer written autobiography; and an interesting set of essays on the life, the autobiographical project, and the art.

Like the other works reviewed here, Bogin's study draws information from the texts that can represent and provide information on Tibetan culture in Yolmowa's time and milieu: the fascinating monastic debate spectacles that were going on, the reincarnated lama phenomenon, the difference between monks and tantric virtuosi (ngakpas), the interest in past lives and future lives, the state of seventeenth-century sectarianism in central Tibet. But the discussion of such topics is always in service of the reader's ability to understand what Yolmowa was doing: how he ever got the idea to paint pictures of his own past lives (and even more surprisingly, future lives), or how it might feel to remember past lives, or how the tension between being a magical emanation and a human being unfolded in personal terms. As he astutely comments at one point, “These categories were not simply in flux because of the time period in which the author lived. Rather the very personal reflections offered upon these meanings of monk and ngakpa force us to consider these roles not just as abstract types but as elements that individuals have incorporated into their own complex identities in countless ways” (p. 33). In this Bogin succeeds in providing us with a very human sense of Yolmowa's life, as he agonizes over decisions and the doubts of others, and so on, all explored with considerable sympathy. The humanness of the material itself of course facilitates this approach. For example, as Bogin notes, the self-image with which Yolmowa closes the painted autobiography has much more to do with his wife and daughter than his public identity. Or again, the stated purpose of the verbal autobiography was to serve as a string of pearls around his wife's neck.

Also like the other books reviewed here, sometimes the analysis does tip towards function and intent—such as reading Yolmowa's stated hope to live his next life not as “the rotten son of red-faced uncles” in Tibet (p. 37) but instead somewhere like Kashmir or the mythological Copper Island as a device to warn his disciples that he may not “return”—rather than as perhaps an expression of a mere aspiration for his own future. But much more often, Bogin manages to soar above strict culturalism, even to briefly compare Yolmowa's self-portraiture with that of both Rembrandt and Cindy Sherman (!), and submits the illustrations to fine-grained stylistic analysis in terms of the very realism and naturalism that make them so wonderful.

Talk about rich materials, Andy Quintman's masterful study of the classic biography of Milarepa, the eleventh-century grandfather of Tibetan yogis, not only involves working with one of the most moving and novelistic works of indigenous writing in the entire, massive library of Tibetan literature, but Quintman has also managed to compile a full set of earlier versions of the life of this famous figure, constructing an archive that could vie with the historiography of Europe or China. He starts with fragments by immediate disciples and then moves on to poetic songs with biographical frames and to full-fledged narratives, numbering 127 by the late fourteenth century, including one by Yamamoto's Lama Zhang. The endpoint is the highly virtuosic rendering by Tsangnyön Heruka, the “Madman of Tsang,” long known to Western readers in translation in several languages.

Quintman establishes authoritatively each of the principle texts in this venerable history, working out their chronology, authorship, and the relationship between editions. His careful study of each version allows the reader to witness the transmutations of rhetoric and literary finesse (which are not always unidirectional), the rewording of episodes, the accretion of episodes, shifts in level of detail, switches in emphasis, and so on, starting with a skeletal account by the famous Buddhist writer Gampopa down to its eventual fleshing out into a kind of I-novel, to borrow the Japanese term, in the work of the Madman. Given the universal privileging of this latter version, both inside and outside Tibet, one feels like one is reading the earlier drafts of a celebrated project wherein the author tries out different ways of telling a story, except that here it is a string of authors over centuries. We are given translated passages of earlier versions of famous episodes, such as Milarepa's first meeting with his teacher, the great Tibetan translator Marpa. We are shown how the motifs of reluctance, temporary self-disguise, and probative testing on the part of teacher shifted in the hands of different stylists (pp. 96, 113), eventuating finally in the multi-level irony, humor, and deliberate undecidabilities of Tsangnyön's brilliant fifteenth-century version, which can now be enjoyed in the fine full translation that Quintman published by Penguin in 2010.Footnote ²

Like Yamamoto, Quintman stresses the importance of tracking the dissemination and reception of auto/biography, and the creation of lineage and authority thereby. But most of all he highlights identity issues, both regarding the figuration of the protagonist, and the author's own felt relationship to him. He recognizes and documents what is probably the central factor in the story's elevation to great literature, namely Tsangnyön's demotion of Milarepa's status to an ordinary human being, in contrast to what is found in most of the early biographical accounts where he is a miraculous emanation of a buddha or great master of the past. The author justified the shift as beneficial for would-be emulators of Mila: it would provide them with a much more realistic and also hopeful vision than a magical one, one in which religious realizations are only gained by hard work and difficult practice (p. 149). I also wonder if this emphasis on the real was part of what opened up the possibility of self-irony and humor. Indeed by virtue of a “strange inversion” (p. 172) from the more common pattern often noted in Tibetan Buddhist historiography whereby mundane life accounts transform only later into more supernatural and idealized narratives, Tsangnyön's turn instead to the human might even be connected to other threads of “early modernity” that can be recognized in Tibetan cultural history.Footnote ³ Actually Quintman shows us that self-effacement and irony is already recognizable, at least in bits, in the earliest version of the story by Gampopa. The latter, for example, put this delightful if perhaps somewhat sarcastic explanation in the mouth of Mila regarding how he managed to fly into the skies: “It's not that I flew. Rather, I lifted my feet a little, pushed down the winds a little, and went off” (p. 197).

Quintman argues that the Madman harbored a strong sense of identity with Mila and provides a detailed study of his own biographies. Tsangnyön's life included multiple visionary encounters with Milarepa, which were only boosted by colleagues' declarations of the Madman's status as a reincarnation of the ascetic of old. Quintman believes these experiences led to Tsangnyön's greatest breakthrough in the Milarepa story, which was to tell the biography in the first person (although this might be qualified slightly, since it is mediated by a frame that makes it Mila's student Rechungpa who is actually recounting the first-person oral narrative “originally” delivered by his master). It might be hard to see how the supernatural idea of reincarnation facilitated a more human subjectivity, but maybe such self-conscious ambivalence is sometimes exactly what makes for good—and realistic—writing. Not that the work is entirely devoid of the supernatural, one example being the famous event of Mila's flight in the sky already mentioned, rendered in a highly humorous vignette in Tsangnyön's hands, which I would encourage readers of this review to discover on their own in Quintman's translation for Penguin. But the bulk of the best parts of the narrative (in my view, of course) are entirely plausible even if rather outré, such as another famous episode where Mila as an emaciated and naked hermit uses up an entire blanket given to him by his chagrined sister by cutting and sewing it into small sheaths, only to cover his fingers and toes and, obligingly, his male organ.Footnote ⁴

The Yogin and the Madman also contains a series of very useful appendices, including a full translation of Gampopa's early biography, a collection of the colophons of some of the most important biographies of Milarepa, and outlines of the narrative units of several of these biographies prior to Tsangnyön Heruka, which slightly perplexingly are provided in some cases in English and in others in Tibetan.

We are really dealing with an embarrassment of riches. Despite having reviewed Love and Liberation already in another journal, I must mention finally Sarah Jacoby's outstanding study of the extraordinary autobiography of Sera Khandro (1892–1940).Footnote ⁵ Traditional autobiographies of Tibetan women are rare, and it is even rarer to find such a detailed and candid one. Add to this that the protagonist was a young beauty from Lhasa who ran away from home to follow a tantric master and ended up a stranger in the far eastern region of Golok, living as a reviled wife and tantric consort but also gaining an eminent following for her own visionary teachings. Like our other authors, Jacoby does plumb the autobiography for representational knowledge, in this case shedding light on the social life of tantric communities in Tibet, especially regarding women and gender relations. In particular, Jacoby pieces together clues to how women perform sexual yoga, the latter being much described in Tibetan literature but virtually always in terms of the experience and anatomy of the male. This to my mind is one of the important contributions of the book.

And yet in all of this Jacoby, like Yamamoto, Bogin, and Quintman, tells her protagonist's story with sympathy. Especially striking is the way that she recognizes what Sera Khandro's many visions of female deities meant for her personally. In short, Jacoby tackles in detail the interesting question of how quotidian realities and the mythic imagination work in concert. The dynamic of the two is all over the autobiography, and we can postulate (even while Jacoby herself wisely resists too easy generalizations) that the human candidness about emotions and love relationships it displays, otherwise rare in Tibetan auto/biography, might have something to do with gendered proclivities.

In the same zone of human-mythic dynamics, it is also Jacoby's task, which she handles seamlessly and with aplomb, to negotiate the fine but critical line between everyday sex and tantric yoga, between abuse and religious service, and between human worry and prophetic voice. This leads her, like Yamamoto, to explore basic cultural categories, in this case love and its kindred emotions. This eventuates in a rich discussion, with comparisons and examples, of a variety of terms in Tibetan both in the autobiography and wider afield. Along with such analysis of meta-concepts we also find in Jacoby's study an inclination to let the author speak in her own words, which, as in Bogin's work, results in the presentation of long translated passages, offering a sense of Sera Khandro's authorial voice. We can look forward to the full translation that seems to be in the offing from Jacoby. And we can be optimistic as well that more work on autobiography will appear soon in the field at large, as more and more of it comes to be recognized in the ever-expanding archive of extant premodern Tibetan writing.