Apparitions of the Self

An investigation into what is known in Tibet as "secret autobiography", a literary genre that presents a personal exploration of intimate religious experiences. The text focuses on the secret autobiographies by the Tibetan Buddhist visionary, Jigme Lingpa (1730-1798).

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An investigation into what is known in Tibet as "secret autobiography", a literary genre that presents a personal exploration of intimate religious experiences. The text focuses on the secret autobiographies by the Tibetan Buddhist visionary, Jigme Lingpa (1730-1798), whose writings are as much the nature of his own identity, memory and the undecidabilities of autobiographical truth as they are narrations of the actual content of his own experiences. The book examines the questions of why Tibetan Buddhists produced so many autobiographies, and how autobigraphical self-assertion is possible even while Buddhists believe that the self is ultimately an illusion. Also explored are Jigme Lingpa's historical milieu, his revelatory visions of the ancient Tibetan dynasty, and his mediative practices of personal cultivation.