Shakya, Riga
| English Phonetics | Riga Tsegyal Shakya |
|---|---|
| Sort Name | Shakya, Riga |
Tibetan calendar dates
Biographical Information
Riga Shakya is a PhD candidate at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. His dissertation delves deeply into the emergence of lay Tibetan Buddhist life writing in the 18th century and its reception up to the 20th century. At once a literary and historical study, Riga examines the innovative use of Indic literary aesthetics in the life writing of 18th century Tibetan ministers, and offers a nuanced, critical understanding of their life-writing as a form of Tibetan Buddhist historiography. Borrowing Riga’s own wording, his project “is the first to examine the emergence of lay Tibetan Buddhist life writing”. He self-consciously refuses the hard dichotomy between the secular and religious spheres often enforced in contemporary academia. In its stead, he privileges an indigenous Tibetan perspective that foregrounds the influence of the Five Minor Sciences on the formation of the lay intellectual elite in the 18th century. This offers readers the opportunity to consider the seamless integration of ‘Buddhism’ and ‘Tibetan-ness’ in the context where these lives were both lived and written, forging a fundamentally decolonial project. Other projects include a longue durée environmental history of the Ganden Podrang’s (1642-1959) management of natural disaster and a study of Tibetan language standardization and print culture at PRC minority publishing houses between 1953 and 1966.
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