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Podcast: New Books in Buddhist Studies
Episode: Annabella Pitkin, "Renunciation and Longing: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
Description: 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 to reimagine cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern.In Renunciation and Longing: The Lif...