Tibetan biographers began writing Jetsun Milarepa's (1052--1135) life story shortly after his death, initiating a literary tradition that turned the poet and saint into a model of virtuosic Buddhist practice throughout the Himalayan world. Andrew Quintman traces this history and its innovations in narrative and aesthetic representation across four centuries, culminating in a detailed analysis of the genre's most famous example, composed in 1488 by Tsangnyn Heruka, or the "Madman of Western Tibet." Quintman imagines these works as a kind of physical body supplanting the yogin's corporeal relics.
Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet's Great Saint Milarepa, Andrew Quintman, Columbia University Press, Paperback, 314 Pages, $38.00
Andrew Quintman is associate professor of Religious Studies at Wesleyan University. He is the author of The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet's Great Saint Milarepa (Columbia University Press 2014).
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Earliest Sources: A Biographical Birth 32
2. Proto-Lives: Formations of a Skeletal Biography 56
3. Biographical Compendia: Lives Made Flesh 82
4. A New Standard: Tsangnyon Heruka's Life and Songs of Milarepa 121
5. The Yogin and the Madman: A Life Brought to Life 155
6. Conclusions 175
Epilogue: Mila Comes Alive! 184
List of Abbreviations 189
Appendix 1 The Life of Jets�n Mila by Gampopa 191
Appendix 2 Text Colophons 199
Appendix 3 Text Outlines and Concordances 207
Notes 226
Bibliography 277
Index 299