Of Tibetans’ Disenchantment, Reclamation, and New Literacy Space: In Conversation with Tenzin Dickie, by Shelly Bhoil

Interviews Shelly Bhoil Tenzin Dickie is a Tibetan writer and translator and editor of The Treasury of Lives, a biographical encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia, and the Himalayan region. Her edited anthology, Old Demons, New Deities: 21 Short Stories from Tibet, was published in 2017 by OR Books. She holds an MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia and a BA in English literature from Harvard. She is currently a Fulbright fellow in Kathmandu. Shelly Bhoil: You explain in the introduction to Old Demons, New Deities that fiction begins with desire, and desire is a non-Buddhist ideal that was demonized in old Tibet, which led to the delay of the organic evolution of Tibetan fiction. Can we say that the coming out of this first-ever collection of Tibetan stories in English signifies Tibetans’ disenchantment with religion? Tenzin Dickie: I do think that’s fair to say. Most Tibetan writers used to write about religion, about Buddhist philosophy and metaphysics and epistemology. They all pretty much came out of the monastic tradition and wrote about things that tradition cared about, which was emptiness and cessation of suffering and enlightenment and not love, honor, betrayal, redemption, and loss. The epic of Gesar and the Sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso’s love poetry were the great exceptions. Otherwise, these were books about getting to nirvana and not about making an accommodation in samsara. It was only later that the... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2019-06-25 14:25:59 UTC ]

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