Best Selling Books by Dominique Townsend

Founded in 1676 during a cosmopolitan early modern period, Mindröling monastery became a key site for Buddhist education and a Tibetan civilizational center. Its founders sought to systematize and institutionalize a worldview rooted in Buddhist philosophy, engaging with contemporaries from across Tibetan Buddhist schools while crystallizing what it meant to be part of their own Nyingma school. At the monastery, ritual performance, meditation, renunciation, and training in the skills of a bureaucrat or member of the literati went hand in hand. Studying at Mindröling entailed training the senses and cultivating the objects of the senses through poetry, ritual music, monastic dance, visual arts, and incense production, as well as medicine and astrology. Dominique Townsend investigates the ritual, artistic, and cultural practices inculcated at Mindröling to demonstrate how early modern Tibetans integrated Buddhist and worldly activities through training in aesthetics. Considering laypeople as well as monastics and women as well as men, A Buddhist Sensibility sheds new light on the forms of knowledge valued in early modern Tibetan societies, especially among the ruling classes. Townsend traces how tastes, values, and sensibilities were cultivated and spread, showing what it meant for a person, lay or monastic, to be deemed well educated. Combining historical and literary analysis with fieldwork in Tibetan Buddhist communities, this book reveals how monastic institutions work as centers of cultural production beyond the boundaries of what is conventionally deemed Buddhist.

Readers of all ages will enjoy this retelling of a beloved spiritual classic. Playfully illustrated in traditional Tibetan style, the story of the monk Shantideva frames his inspiring lessons on the way of the bodhisattva superhero. Shantideva: How to Wake Up a Hero is the retelling of Shantideva’s teachings before a surprised audience, who had thought he was useless and could only eat, sleep, and poop. Leading his listeners into a superhero training of different kind, he reveals the secret to perfect bravery and unbounded compassion and shows how anyone can develop them. You don’t need super-strength or magical powers, he says. You just need compassion and wisdom. A dozen illustrations painted in traditional Tibetan style draw in readers to this work that will be treasured not only by Buddhist families but by anyone who aspires to become more kind and wise.

"The Weather & Our Tempers offers a vision of a world exceptional as it is mundane, funny as it is tragic, a world that relies on our perception of it even as it changes our perception."--www.Amazon.com.

This comparison serves to highlight commonalities between distant and familiar educational models and undercuts the tendency to diminish Tibetan culture to an exoticized imagining of Buddhism as a purely ascetic, world renouncing tradition. Although Mindroling was in many regards an exemplary model of monasticism, rather than focusing solely on renunciation Mindroling's founders aimed to integrate a Buddhist doctrinal perspective with being in the world. The cultivation of aesthetics and practical ethics were as central to a Mindroling education as composition, rhetoric and Buddhist doctrine. During the dissertation's period of focus, Mindroling alumni consistently went on to successful careers in a highly complex sociopolitical milieu that comprised Tibetan, Mongol and Qing elements. In addition to its role as a school, the monastery was a center for literature and rituals that helped unify the Tibetan polity, a unification that was still underway and frequently contested. Buddhist rituals are inextricably tied to Buddhist aesthetics and material culture, making Mindroling a center for the arts as well.