Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Tibetans have been producing "treasure" (gter ma ) for close to a thousand years. This loosely defined category of revelatory materials encompasses such things as physical texts and objects extracted from the ground, the discovery of concealed scriptures in the mind of the revealer, and teachings received from visionary encounters with saints and deities. Recent decades have seen a growing number of Western devotees joining religious organizations that take treasure texts as authoritative and a corresponding increase in scholarly attention to the claims and practices of the Tibetan treasure tradition. Andreas Doctor's Tibetan Treasure Literature: Revelation, Tradition, and Accomplishment in Visionary Buddhism is a book with ambitions to appeal to both audiences, and it succeeds at providing each with a compelling resource.
The book consists of three related but essentially independent sections. The first is a general survey of issues relating to the treasure tradition. The second section deals with the hagiography of the nineteenth-century treasure revealer Mchog gyur gling pa, and the third is a masterful translation of two texts drawn from that revealer's treasures.
Both scholars and practitioners will find the first two chapters the most interesting. They are perhaps the finest introduction to the Tibetan treasure tradition to date, well suited for the...