About

My work abides at the intersections of the philosophical, historical, poetical, and experiential dimensions of Buddhist literary culture in Tibet. Most broadly, I am interested in the transmission and reception of knowledge; how strategies of transmission — such as textual productions, visual and ritual media, doctrinal articulations, and auto/biographical narratives — have altered and/or empowered Buddhist discourses.

As a graduate student at CIIS in San Francisco, working with Steven Goodman, my studies focused on reading classical Buddhist Indian and Tibetan curricular texts. Influenced by the Buddhologist Herbert Guenther, via my advisor, much of my doctoral training drew from the commentarial literature of the Dzogchen and Mahamudra meditative traditions.

Though I’ve studied and traveled throughout Asia and the Himalayan world since 1994, the most shapeshifting experience was the period of three years — from 2005 to 2008 — that I spent living in a Buddhist monastery in the nomadic region of Amdo, far eastern Tibet. During that time, I studied closely with Khenpo Kunga Sherab Salje in the cultural domain of Golok, as well as with native scholars in Dzamthang and Ngawa. Much of my time during those years was spent reading zhentong philosophical and contemplative literature, and studying the history of the Jonangpa transmission lineages. This served as the basis for my dissertation on the zhentong masterpiece by Khenpo Sherab’s primary teacher and one of the great modern Jonangpa authors from Dzamthang, Khenpo Lodro Drakpa (1920-1975).

In 2004, friends and I, under the advisement of elder Jonangpa masters, founded the nonprofit organization, Jonang Foundation. The foundation supports educational and cultural preservation initiatives on-the-ground in Tibet, and serves as an online resource for the Jonang tadition of Tibetan Buddhism. We have constructed a schoolhouse for several hundred nomad children, actively patron numerous primary and secondary schools throughout eastern Tibet, and publish Tibetan language materials that are distributed to Jonang monastic colleges. Our research currently focuses on documenting and mapping historic and contemporary sites of the Jonangpa across the Tibetan plateau, interlinking these sites with our database of Jonang master biographies and  gallery of artifacts. My  dear friend, the Jonangpa tulku Kunga Zangpo and I host a biannual summer pilgrimage to the power places of Tibet as a fundraiser for the foundation.

After completion of my doctoral work in Buddhist studies in 2007, when the duration of my extended stay in Golok was over, I took-up a scholar-in-residence position under the guidance of the legendary Tibetologist E. Gene Smith (1936-2010) at the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC) in New York City. TBRC is an online research library of Tibetan literature, founded by Gene Smith in 1999. From my arrival in January of 2008 until his passing, I had the good fortune to spend my working days in conversation with Gene during the latter years of his life. Gene’s mentorship and methods of scholarship left a deep impression on me.

Trained by Gene, I act as the Head of Research at TBRC, collaborating with our team of Tibetan scholars in the Department of Research. Much of our work is concerned with developing and enriching access points within the TBRC library to advance research and scholarship about Tibetan literature. We facilitate a synergetic coupling of scholarly inquiry with technological resources. Some of what we do in our department includes curating the digital library, sustaining its knowledge model, annotating and enriching objects within the library such as deep semantic markup of textual outlines with Tibetan genre and subject classifications, biographic and geographic records, and lexical tools.

My own writing and translation focuses on the literary productions of lesser-known transmission lineages of Buddhism in Tibet. I continue to write on the literary history of zhentong, and my forthcoming book, The Living Jonangpa [Wisdom Publications] is a study of the intellectual history of the Jonang Buddhist tradition. I am working on the writings of Taranatha (1575-1635), and translating the autobiography of one of his close disciples, the female adept Thinley Wangmo. Other areas of my research include Tibetan life writing, Shangpa and Dzogchen instructions, and poetics.

For the past three years, I’ve been a lecturer at The New School University in lower Manahattan where I’ve taught courses on Buddhism, Himalayan visual culture, and Tibetan language and literature. My courses are offered in concert with exhibits at the Rubin Museum of Art. I also serve as the faculty director of The New School’s study excursion in Tibet.