Lopez, D.

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PeopleLopez, D.


Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

Donald S. Lopez, Jr. was born in Washington, D. C. in 1952 and was educated at the University of Virginia, receiving a doctorate in Religious Studies in 1982. After teaching at Middlebury College, he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1989, where he is currently Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. He is the author or editor of more than twenty books, which have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Czech, Polish, Korean, and Chinese. His books include Buddhism in Practice (Princeton, 1995), Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sutra (Princeton, 1996), Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism (Chicago, 1995), Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago, 1998), The Story of Buddhism (Harper San Francisco, 2001), A Modern Buddhist Bible (Beacon, 2002), Buddhist Scriptures (Penguin Classics, 2004), Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism (Chicago, 2005), The Madman's Middle Way: Reflections on Reality of the Tibetan Monk Gendun Chopel (Chicago, 2005), Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed (Chicago, 2008), and In the Forest of Faded Wisdom: 104 Poems of Gendun Chopel (Chicago, 2009). He has also served as editor of the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. In 2002-03 he served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Getty Research Institute. In 1998 he was named Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, the University of Michigan's highest award for undergraduate teaching. In 2000 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005, he was named a Distinguished University Professor. In 2007, he received the John H. D'Arms Faculty Award for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities. He currently serves as chair of the Michigan Society of Fellows and as chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. (Source Accessed July 22, 2020)

Library Items

Video
Donald S. Lopez, Jr. - Keynote of the 2019 Tathāgatagarbha Symposium
In his keynote lecture to the Vienna Tathāgatagarbha Symposium, Donald Lopez provides an overview of the history and influence of tathāgatagarbha doctrine as well as its various interpretations across the Mahāyāna world.
Lopez, Donald S., Jr. “Tathāgatagarbha: A Brief History.” Keynote lecture at the University of Vienna Symposium, Tathāgatagarbha Across Asia, Vienna, Austria, July 2019. Video, 40:17. https://youtu.be/0SSSdNNbeu8.
Book
Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler
In 1941, philosopher and poet Gendun Chopel (1903–51) sent a large manuscript by ship, train, and yak across mountains and deserts to his homeland in the northeastern corner of Tibet. He would follow it five years later, returning to his native land after twelve years in India and Sri Lanka. But he did not receive the welcome he imagined: he was arrested by the government of the regent of the young Dalai Lama on trumped-up charges of treason. He emerged from prison three years later a broken man and died soon after.

Gendun Chopel was a prolific writer during his short life. Yet he considered that manuscript, which he titled Grains of Gold, to be his life’s work, one to delight his compatriots with tales of an ancient Indian and Tibetan past, while alerting them to the wonders and dangers of the strikingly modern land abutting Tibet’s southern border, the British colony of India. Now available for the first time in English, Grains of Gold is a unique compendium of South Asian and Tibetan culture that combines travelogue, drawings, history, and ethnography. Gendun Chopel describes the world he discovered in South Asia, from the ruins of the sacred sites of Buddhism to the Sanskrit classics he learned to read in the original. He is also sharply, often humorously critical of the Tibetan love of the fantastic, bursting one myth after another and finding fault with the accounts of earlier Tibetan pilgrims. Exploring a wide range of cultures and religions central to the history of the region, Gendun Chopel is eager to describe all the new knowledge he gathered in his travels to his Buddhist audience in Tibet.

At once the account of the experiences of a tragic figure in Tibetan history and the work of an extraordinary scholar, Grains of Gold is an accessible, compelling work animated by a sense of discovery of both a distant past and a strange present. (Source: University of Chicago Press)
Chöpel, Gendun. Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler. Translated by Thupten Jinpa and Donald S. Lopez Jr. Buddhism and Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Affiliations & relations

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