Janet Gyatso

Janet Gyatso is a specialist in Buddhist studies with concentration on Tibetan and South Asian cultural history and the Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies at Harvard University. Gyatso was president of the International Association of Tibetan Studies from 2000 to 2006, and co-chair of the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion from 2004 to 2010. She teaches lecture courses and advanced seminars on Buddhist history, ritual, and ideas, and on Tibetan literary practices and religious history. In both teaching and writing she draws on cultural and literary theory, and endeavors to widen the spectrum of intellectual resources for the understanding of Buddhist and Tibetan history. She is the faculty director of the Harvard Buddhist Studies Forum. She is also a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on the Study of Religion, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies. She will chair the Committee on Women, Sexuality, and Gender in Religion at the Divinity School in 2012 and is involved in the development of a new track for the training of Buddhist lay ministers and leaders in the master of divinity program. Gyatso taught at Amherst College before coming to Harvard as the Divinity School’s first Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies.

Books, Courses & Podcasts

The Lives and Liberation of Princess Mandarava

This lucid translation of a rare Tibetan text makes available for the first time to Western readers the remarkable life story of Princess Madarava. As the principal consort of the eighth century Indian master Padmasambhava before he introduced tantric Buddhism to Tibet, Mandarava is the Indian counterpart of the Tibetan consort Yeshe Tsogyal. Lives and Liberation recounts her struggles and triumphs as a Buddhist adept throughout her many lives and is an authentic deliverance story of a female Buddhist master. Those who read this book will gain inspiration and encouragement on the path to liberation.

Learn more about Princess Mandarava at the Treasury of Lives.

Sarah Harding: Dharma Journeys of Practice & Translation (#112)

This episode of the Wisdom Podcast, recorded live as a Wisdom Dharma Chat, features a conversation with Sarah Harding, a translator and qualified lama in the Shangpa Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Sarah and host Daniel Aitken discuss many topics including her new book with Wisdom, Four Tibetan Lineages.

In 1972, Sarah became a student and translator of Kalu Rinpoche (1905-1989), one of the first Tibetan masters to teach in the West. She works as a teacher, oral interpreter, and translator, and has taught in the religious studies department of Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Sarah translated Creation and Completion: Essential Points of Tantric Meditation by Jamgön Kongtrul and is currently working on translations of Tibetan Buddhist texts as a fellow of the Tsadra Foundation.Sarah recalls how she began reading Buddhist texts, including The Life of Milarepa, when she was in high school. In subsequent years, she traveled across the world, eventually ending up in the Darjeeling region of India, where she became a student of Kalu Rinpoche in the Shangpa lineage along with a handful of other Westerners. Following time spent traveling back and forth between India and Nepal, Sarah went to northern Thailand and attended a retreat with Ven. Mahasi Sayadaw, and she comments on the differences of practice in a Theravada context. Finally, after a return to America, she embarked on a three-year retreat in France and recounts what daily life was like there and the difficulty of integrating back into society afterwards. Sarah and Daniel also get into a discussion of Sarah’s experiences with the traditional practice of chöd.To learn more about some of the tantric meditation practices that Sarah mentions, please check out her translated work, Creation and Completion, available through Wisdom.