(Download) "Lord of the Dance: The Mani Rimdu Festival in Tibet and Nepal (Reviews of Books) (Book Review)" by The Journal of the American Oriental Society " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Lord of the Dance: The Mani Rimdu Festival in Tibet and Nepal (Reviews of Books) (Book Review)
- Author : The Journal of the American Oriental Society
- Release Date : January 01, 2003
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 195 KB
Description
Lord of the Dance: The Mani Rimdu Festival in Tibet and Nepal. By RICHARD J. KOHN. SUNY Series in Buddhist Studies, Matthew Kapstein, ed. Albany: STATE UNIV. OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2001. Pp. xxxiv + 366. $86.50 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). Reading cover-to-cover the late Richard Kohn's monumental study of Mani Rimdu, an annual festival held at several Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in northeastern Nepal, is a marathon remotely akin to that undertaken by the Sherpa and Tibetan monks and lamas who perform this complex three-week-long event. For good reason. As Matthew Kapstein states in his foreword to this book, Kohn's work on Mani Rimdu, including a 1,000-page dissertation (1988) and a documentary film (1985), (1) is perhaps "the fullest cinematographic and textual documentation of a major Tibetan ritual cycle yet achieved" (p. xvii). Kohn tells us that he came to Mani Rimdu via an interest in understudied forms of Buddhist temporary art. Quickly realizing, however, that such art could not be comprehended without attention to its vital ritual contexts, Kohn shifted his focus to a study of the festival as a whole, initiating in his words, "a juggernaut of research that was to roll for a decade" (p. xxii). This book represents the culmination of that research and of a career that was unfortunately cut far too short." (2)