Recipient of the American Academy of Religion’s 2014 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion–Textual Studies.

Recipient of the 2015 Heyman Prize for outstanding scholarship from Yale University.

Honorable Mention for the 2016 Association for Asian Studies’ E. Gene Smith Book Prize.

The Yogin and the Madman:  Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa (Columbia University Press 2014, South Asia Across the Disciplines Series) is the first extended literary history of the biographical tradition surrounding Tibet’s most famous Buddhist saint, the eleventh-century hermit and poet Milarepa. The book likewise presents the first analysis of an entire Himalayan textual tradition by tracing its historical formation, changing narrative voices, eventual canonical status, and enduring legacy across the region. It surveys a wide range of previously unstudied sources including numerous rare and early manuscripts and prints never available before. Following the approach of European medievalist Patrick Geary to probe hagiographic writing through the “threefold intersection of genre, total textual production, and historical circumstance,” the book examines changing relationships between these texts, their narratives, and representations over some four centuries of Tibetan biographical writing. It thus illuminates the various forms in which the yogin’s life story has been re-imagined and re-written in the context of the broader historical and religious conditions that allowed for such forms of literary production. In doing so it questions how sacred lives are recorded and transmitted, how their structures and functions change over time, and how their changing forms affect the reading of their content.

The book begins with initial fragmentary accounts of Milarepa’s life story composed shortly after his death, which include examples of Tibet’s earliest biographical literature. It next addresses new forms of literary production such as the encyclopedic biographical compendia that form our most comprehensive textual records of the yogin’s life. The book culminates in an extended analysis of Milarepa’s canonical biography, completed in 1488, and its iconoclastic author Tsangnyon Heruka, the infamous “Madman of Tibet.” This text has been called “the single greatest work of Tibetan literature” and would transform both the religious and literary landscapes of the Tibetan Buddhist world—Milarepa would become the paradigm for virtuosic religious practice throughout the Himalaya and his biography, a model for Buddhist life writing. The Madman’s version also profoundly affected how Tibetan Buddhism and its religious literature have been studied and interpreted in the West.

The Yogin and the Madman imagines Milarepa’s literary corpus as a kind of physical body, a literary relic supplanting the yogin’s corporeal relics that mysteriously disappeared after his passing. Milarepa’s death brought with it a biographic birth, and soon the life story was repeated and re-written. As authors began suturing together the narratives of his biography, an image of the yogin came into view; first skeletal, later incorporating more complex literary structures. Comprehensive accounts formed an increasingly lifelike representation until late in the fifteenth century Milarepa’s portrait embodied in the Madman’s creation was brought to life, both literarily and literally. The new biography (styled as an autobiography) was an elegant and sophisticated literary work, but its author also literally identified himself as the living reembodiment of his own biographical subject recounting the events of a former life, thereby effectively silencing centuries of earlier literary production.

Late in the eleventh century a wandering mendicant, the Yogin, starved himself in the frigid mountains of southern Tibet while undertaking ascetic practice. He lived in solitude on a diet of boiled nettles. His skin is said to have turned green as a result. He is then said to have become a buddha, a perfect teacher, who was also famous for his poetry and songs of spiritual realization. Four hundred years later, a tantric adept emerged from the jungles of Tibet’s border with Northeast India, naked, human entrails wound in his dangling dreadlocks. This adept, the Madman, composed a new and novelistic version of the Yogin’s life. The story it told of a great Tibetan saint would inspire new forms of religious literature across the Himalayan world, new styles of artistic production, new traditions of spiritual practice. Great teachers would emulate the deeds it described and quote from it freely in their own autobiographical writing. In time, the Madman’s version of the Yogin’s life would become Tibet’s most famous book. But it was also the first Tibetan book translated into a European language.

The Life of Milarepa (Penguin Classics 2010) is a new English translation of the Yogin's celebrated biography. While numerous early Tibetan versions of the life story exist, including several that may date from his lifetime, the best known account was composed in 1488 by Tsangnyon Heruka, the so-called “Madman of Tsang,” based upon numerous earlier works. Its narrative focuses on Milarepa’s early wrongdoings, his subsequent training and meditation, and eventual death. It is a companion to the collected spiritual songs of Milarepa (often referred to as The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa), also arranged and printed by Tsangnyon Heruka, which records Milarepa’s later teaching career through a compilation of his religious instruction and songs of realization. Tsangnyon Heruka's version of The Life of Milarepa is known and read throughout the Tibetan Buddhist cultural world and widely accepted as a landmark of literary achievement by Tibetans and western scholars alike.

The account of Milarepa’s life profoundly impacted the development of sacred biography in Tibet, a prominent genre in Tibetan Buddhist culture, and has influenced the way in which Tibet’s Buddhism and culture have been understood in the west. It is perhaps the single greatest work of Tibetan literature, a powerfully evocative narrative, full of magic, miracles, suspense, and humor, while reflecting the religious and social life of medieval Tibet.

Over decades, hundreds of American undergraduates spending a semester abroad have been introduced to Tibetan culture in India, Nepal, and China by Hubert Decleer. A number went on to become prominent scholars in the field at institutions such as Yale, Berkeley, and Georgetown, and as a tribute to him they have put together this collection of cutting-edge research in Himalayan studies, bringing together contributions of this new generation with those of senior researchers in the field. This new research on the religion and culture of the Himalayan Buddhist world spans a broad range of subjects, periods, and approaches, and the diversity and strength of the contributions ensures Himalayan Passages be warmly welcomed by scholars, travelers, and Tibetan Buddhists alike.

Highlights include: