ACLS Project Title: Self, Society, and Sentiment in the
Auto/biographical Writings of a Tibetan Female Visionary
Sera Khandro Dewé Dorjé,
1892-1940
Tentative Book Title: Love and Liberation in the
Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Visionary Sera
Khandro, Columbia UP, under contract, expected 2014
Sarah Jacoby, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies,
Northwestern University
So What?
• The “Narrative Identity Thesis”:
– “Each of us constructs and lives a
‘narrative,’ and that this narrative is us, our
identities.” (Oliver Sacks, The Man who
Mistook his Wife for a Hat)
– “Narrative, rather than referring to ‘reality,’
may in fact create or constitute it.” (Jerome
Bruner, "The Narrative Construction of
Reality”)
GOLOK TIBETAN AUTONOMOUS
PREFECTURE, QINGHAI PROVINCE, PRC
Amnyé Machen Mountain
20,605 ft.
European Exceptionalism on
Autobiography
• “Moreover, it would seem that
autobiography is not to be
found outside of our cultural
area; one would say that it
expresses a concern peculiar to
Western man, a concern that
has been of good use in his
systematic conquest of the
universe and that he has
communicated to men of other
cultures.”
(Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions
and Limits of Autobiography,”
1956)
European Exceptionalism on
Passionate Love
• “we should expect to find the origins—or at least
the intensification—of romantic love in the rise of
the individual in the ‘West.’” (Robert Solomon,
Love: Emotion, Myth, & Metaphor, 1990)
• William Reddy finds the opposition between
desire “conceived of as an appetite” and true love
“conceived of as selfless care and devotion to
another” as “unique to Western conceptions and
practices.” (Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love,
2012)
Hayagrīva and
Vajravārāhī
Insight (Sanskrit
prajñā, Tibetan
shes rab)
And skillful
means (Skt.
upāya, Tib. thabs
shes) , also called
compassion (Skt.
karuṇā, Tib.
snying rje)
Drimé Özer and
Sera Khandro
The Buddhist Doctrine of
Interdependence
• “When this exists, that comes to be; with the
arising of this, that arises. When this does not
exist, that does not come to be; with the
cessation of this, that ceases.” Samyuttanikāya (II, 28)