Agency and the rhetoric of destiny

This dissertation introduces the lives and letters of a contemporary religious couple, Khandro Tare Lhamo and Namtrul Jigme Phuntsok, who made a significant contribution to the Buddhist revival in the Tibetan region of Golok, beginning in the 1980s. This couple is distinctive in that literary works by and about them are intertwined, including their hagiographies, collected letters, and twelve-volume corpus of joint revelations. While discussing their twenty-year teaching career as a couple, this dissertation also focuses on Khandro Tare Lhamo as the most widely known female teacher of her generation in Golok and among a select few Tibetan women to enter into the literary record with a significant corpus of writings. As a literary analysis, complemented by ethnographic field research, this dissertation examines the representation of agency in works by and about Khandro Tare Lhamo and Namtrul Jigme Phuntsok. I examine the striking contrast in formulations of agency in two distinct genres, the idealized account in their hagiographies composed by a devoted disciple and the more intimate portrait found in a collection of their letters exchanged between 1978 and 1980, on the cusp of liberalization in China. This extensive collection of fifty-six letters, which I received from Namtrul Jigme Phuntsok, is the first collection of Tibetan "love letters" to come to light and gain scholarly attention. Tracing the prophetic and personal dimensions of their courtship, I examine their visionary conceptions of "love" and "revival" as well as the emergence of their agency as a tantric couple, a topic rarely broached in Buddhist Studies. Though this eminent case, I highlight contemporary Tibetan agency and its representation within a Buddhist framework. I examine the narrative strategies and symbolic resources marshaled by Khandro Tare Lhamo and Namtrul Jigme Phuntsok that entail the deflection of agency as a means to assert agency, which I term the rhetoric of destiny . Employing Dipesh Chakrabarty's notion of "minority voices," I suggest that the sources under consideration in this dissertation present an alternative history to the master narrative of the Chinese Communist state in Buddhist terms.