HTIB00672U Tibetan ‘historiographical’ and ‘biographical’ Texts: Genres, Narratives, and Histories

This module is discussing texts that have frequently been used for the study of Tibetan history or the examination of Buddhist persons of the past. In focus are Buddhist hagiographies in general and more specifically the Tibetan rnam thar, “spiritual biography”, “liberation story” or “hagiography” along with chos byung (“religious history”) and related texts. We will discuss some relevant prototypes from India and elsewhere, narrative patterns, repeated tropes, cultural functions, and the concept of genre. Additionally this module aims to examine the use of such texts for research and presents some methodological approaches, in particular methods deriving from narratology.