Prof. Dr. Lewis Doney: Tibetan Buddhist Art in a Leisure Context: A Case Study from a Newly Constructed “Sacred” Site in Kathmandu
Tibetan Buddhist historiography tends towards a “borderland complex” that fueled fascination with, and pilgrimage to, holy sites in South Asia. Yet, focusing on central Nepal—as both a destination for devotees and a periphery from the perspective of the major sites of the Buddha’s life—problematises applying such discourse to modern times. Kathmandu’s Boudhanath Stūpa has on its own periphery a newly created “Ghyoilisang Pond and Peace Park” devoted to the eighth-century tantric master and “second Buddha,” Padmasambhava. This site expresses Tibetan, Newar, Tamang and other Himalayan identities as part of its architecture, iconography and as used by pilgrims, tourists and locals. Yet the park is also a leisure destination funded in part by the Chinese Embassy in Kathmandu and run by Nepali municipal administrators. This presentation analyses its ecology in relation to other sites visited by followers of Tibetan Buddhism in Nepal that are both old and new. It will also contextualise them within older dynamics of pilgrims creating and reading space, identifying the “sacred” and negotiating holy sites.
Prof. Dr. Lewis Doney
Department for Mongolian and Tibetan Studies, University of Bonn, Germany
Lewis.doney@uni-bonn.de
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3314-302X
Lewis Doney is Professor of Tibetan Studies at Bonn and Principal Investigator of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS). He received his PhD (Study of Religions) from SOAS, University of London, in 2011. He was then engaged in postdoctoral research on early Tibetan life writing, empire and religion, Tibetan relations with South Asia and to cultural identities and ecologies in the Himalayas. His publications include a solo-authored monograph titled The Zangs gling ma: The First Padmasambhava Biography (International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, 2014), an edited volume, Bringing Buddhism to Tibet: History and Narrative in the dBa’ bzhed Manuscript (De Gruyter, 2021) and a monograph co-authored with Brandon Dotson: Producing Buddhist Sutras in Ninth-Century Tibet: The Sutra of Limitless Life and its Dunhuang Copies Kept at the British Library (De Gruyter, 2025).