Vimalamitra The Legend Of An Indian Saint And His Tibetan Emanations Doctor Of Philosophy In Religious Studies Thesis Joel Stephen Gruber by Joel Stephen Gruber instant download after payment.

One of the oldest narratives detailing the birth of the Indian saint Vimalamitra claims he was the son of an unwed virgin, Dharmabodhi, who was so ashamed that her son had no father & that she had no husband, she buried her newborn under a mound of sand. As she prepared to leave the child to die, she wept until she could no longer bear the pain. Fleeing the burial mound in a grief-stricken state, she looked back one last time & noticed that her child’s eyes were glowing so brightly they shone straight through the sand. Startled, she ran back to uncover the young Vimalamitra & raised him to become a Buddhist master.
Though Vimalamitra’s bright eyes motivated his mother to disinter the buried child, the reasons that Tibetans unearthed the name of an 8th century Indian scholar to rewrite his legacy & attribute texts en masse to him over 300 years after he departed Tibet are more difficult to adduce.
There are good reasons this is the first comprehensive study of one of the most important saints in Tibetan history. Along with being an important figure, Vimalamitra is one of the most confounding saints from the imperial era. Decade after decade, Tibetan Buddhists wrote, re-wrote, & then re-wrote again the life story of the 8th-century Buddhist saint.Century after century, they constructed namtars (rnam thar), a genre in Tibetan literature that is akin to hagiography. Because a Western conception of historical accuracy was not of chief concern to these authors, as the number of Vimalamitra-related namtars increased, so did the conflicting presentations of the biographical details of the Indian saint’s life. As a result, there is little that can be said with any degree of certainty regarding the life and teachings of the “historical” Vimalamitra.
This study elucidates a previously untold textual history of a millennium-long exchange between a quasi-mythical Indian saint and the Tibetan communities who continuously wrote the tantric (esoteric) texts that bo