Renunciation and Longing

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Renunciation and Longing: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint

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Descriptionངོ་སྤྲོད།

In the early twentieth century, Khunu Lama journeyed across Tibet and India, meeting Buddhist masters while sometimes living, so his students say, on cold porridge and water. Yet this elusive wandering renunciant became a revered teacher of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At Khunu Lama’s death in 1977, he was mourned by Himalayan nuns, Tibetan lamas, and American meditators alike. The many surviving stories about him reveal significant dimensions of Tibetan Buddhism, shedding new light on questions of religious affect and memory that reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern.

In Renunciation and Longing, Annabella Pitkin explores devotion, renunciation, and the teacher-student lineage relationship as resources for understanding Tibetan Buddhist approaches to modernity. By examining narrative accounts of the life of a remarkable twentieth-century Himalayan Buddhist and focusing on his remembered identity as a renunciant bodhisattva, Pitkin illuminates Tibetan and Himalayan practices of memory, affective connection, and mourning. Refuting long-standing caricatures of Tibetan Buddhist communities as unable to be modern because of their religious commitments, Pitkin shows instead how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist narrators have used themes of renunciation, devotion, and lineage as touchstones for negotiating loss and vitalizing continuity.

(Source: University of Chicago Press)

Citation

Pitkin, Annabella. Renunciation and Longing: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint. Buddhism and Modernity. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgmentsxi
• Technical Note on Phonetic Transcription, Transliteration, and Naming Practicesxix
• Maps of Khunu Lama’s Travelsxxi
• Chronologyxxiii

• INTRODUCTION
• Themes in the Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Renunciant1

• CHAPTER 1
• "Like Water into Water": Transmission Lineages in Tibetan Buddhism25

• CHAPTER 2
• "He abandoned his homeland for the sake of the Dharma": Tibetan Buddhist Imaginaries of Home-Leaving and Renunciation48

• CHAPTER 3
• "Aim Your Dharma Practice at a Beggar's Life"75

• CHAPTER 4
• Dislocation and Continuity112

• CHAPTER 5
• "With such devotion that tears cascade from your eyes": Renunciation, Separation, and Guru Devotion135

• CHAPTER 6
• Death and Other Disruptions: Dying Like a Dog in the Wilderness162

• EPILOGUE194

• Glossary199
• Notes207
• Bibliography243
• Index267

Interconnections

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Smṛtiḥ - Mindfulness is the ability to keep a chosen object or the present moment in mind without forgetting it. It acts as a stable foundation for meditation and daily awareness. Skt स्मृति  Tib དྲན་པ་  Ch 念  

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Bodhisattva - A person who seeks enlightenment for the sake of others. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a compassionate being who is training on the path to buddhahood and aspires to eliminate the suffering of all beings and take all sentient beings to the state of enlightenment. The Mahāyāna sūtras including those on buddha-nature generally have bodhisattvas as the main audience or interlocutors for the Buddha's discourses. Skt बोधिसत्त्व  Tib བྱང་ཆུབ་སེམས་དཔའ།  Ch 菩薩  

Go to the page with the definition of 'bodhisattva'