Description: Love Letters from Golok chronicles the courtship between two Buddhist tantric masters, Tare Lhamo (1938-2002) and Namtrul Rinpoche (1944-2011), and their passion for reinvigorating Buddhism in eastern Tibet during the post-Mao era. Holly Gayley retrieves the personal and prophetic dimensions of their courtship and its consummation.
Brief description: Holly Gayley (PhD, Tibetan and Himalayan Studies, Harvard) is Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has published essays in The Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Numen, and The History of Religions and in the collections Mapping the Modern in Tibet (International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies) and The Invention of Sacred Tradition (Cambridge).
Review Quotes: An extraordinary set of letters between a man and woman lie at the heart of this study of love, religious transcendence, and cultural trauma in post-Cultural Revolution Tibet. I know of no body of material that gives a more intricate picture of how Tibetan Tantric Buddhism could penetrate and transform worldly troubles and politics into the sublime aspirations of tantric vision. Gayley offers us an unparalleled view of twentieth-century Tibetan religion as it touched every aspect of human life. Plus an astonishing account of a female master whose romance with another master elevated them both into heroes for Eastern Tibet during most challenging times.--Janet Gyatso, Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies, Harvard University