This volume focuses upon the relationships between the past and the present evoked in Tibetan historiography, ritual literature, and Buddhist esoteric writings. It offers diverse perspectives on a critical period in Tibet’s history when Tibetans found themselves caught up in the tides of political turmoil and forced into the center of a much larger Central Eurasian struggle for power and territorial control between the Manchu rulers of the Qing empire and the Mongols of the north. The volume highlights the various ways Tibetan historians, biographers, and Buddhist scholars during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries succeeded in the task of reinventing and reinforcing their respective traditions.

Bryan J. Cuevas, Ph.D. (2000) in History of Religions and Tibetan Studies, University of Virginia, is Associate Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at Florida State University. He is the author of The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Oxford UP, 2003) and co-editor of The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations (Kuroda Institute/University of Hawai'i Press, 2007).

Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Ph.D. (2000), Harvard University, is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Himalayan Hermitess: The Life of a Tibetan Buddhist Nun (Oxford UP, 2004) and Dreaming the Great Brahmin: Tibetan Traditions of the Buddhist Poet-Saint Saraha (Oxford UP, 2005).