Craig, Sienna R., Barbara Gerke, and Jan M. A. van der Valk. eds. 2020. "Responding to an Unfolding Pandemic: Asian Medicines and Covid-19." Hot Spots, Fieldsights, June 23. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/responding-to-an-unfolding-pandemic-asian-medicines-and-covid-19
Scholars across disciplines working on Asian medicines are currently encountering a multitude of ... more Scholars across disciplines working on Asian medicines are currently encountering a multitude of responses to the ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease (Covid-19), whether they are anthropologists who were recently in the field (or are under lockdown) or textual scholars making sense of the outbreak through the historiography of epidemics as depicted in classical medical and ritual texts. Varied ideas on what counts as contagion, what works for prevention, and what Asian medicines can offer in terms of treatment are circulating widely, leading to heated debates within and between practitioners, patients, and through public health policies. Traditional Asian medical texts and practices are being drawn on for anti-epidemic recipes and precautionary measures. These forms of engagement are, in turn, recasting established boundaries between nationalities, raising new questions about the enduring relationship between science and religion, and leading to novel interfaces between medical traditions and health professionals. In these entangled times of containment, protection, and (self-)care, this Hot Spots series brings together interdisciplinary accounts on the history, contemporary practices, and politics of epidemics in general, and in particular in relation to traditional medicines from Chinese and TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), Daoist, Sowa Rigpa, Indian Ayurveda, Japanese Kampo, South Korean, and Vietnamese contexts.
These essays were written in March and April 2020.
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Papers by Barbara Gerke
The COVID-19 pandemic has offered an opportunity to revisit Asian medical ideas of contagion from fresh perspectives, textually, as well as through ethnographic research in societies in which pre-modern ideas of contagion are still part of lived medical practices. During the ARI workshop on religion, COVID-19 vaccines, and structures of trust, it became clear that issues of “faith in immunity” in Asian medical contexts cannot fully be understood without first researching underlying conceptions of contagion and epidemic disease that might affect trust in vaccines. This research poses several challenges, which we will address in an interdisciplinary project introduced below.
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/responding-to-an-unfolding-pandemic-asian-medicines-and-covid-19
The idea for this Hot Spots series emerged in early March 2020, as the epidemic was moving from Asia to Europe and North America. The essays presented here were written during the months of March and April 2020, and therefore roughly relate to events and debates unfolding during that time period of the pandemic. ....
“epistemic genre” (Pomata 2013) not only list ingredients
but also encode historical data of knowledge transmission.
Combining ethnographic fieldwork with Tibetan physicians and textual
analysis of Tibetan formula books dating back to the seventeenth
century that are still in use, I raise questions on how formulas as a
genre are a meeting point between continuity and change and directly
influence the transmission of medical knowledge and affect contemporary medical practice. Taking the example of the Tibetan “precious pill” Precious Old Turquoise 25, I ask how specific recipes have
been composed and passed on by Tibetan authors and contemporary
Tibetan physicians over time. I argue that in the context of Sowa
Rigpa (gso ba rig pa, “Science of Healing”), even today, the design of
formulas necessitates continuity, authenticity, continual interpretation,
reformulation, and personal “signatures” in the making of remedies,
now largely within the context of institutionalized knowledge
transmission. In India, this poses a challenge for the present codification
of formulas into a standardized pharmacopeia as currently required
for four medical traditions (Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, and
Homeopathy) registered under AYUSH (the Ministry of Ayurveda,
Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Sowa Rigpa, and Homoeopathy,
Government of India), under which Sowa Rigpa was officially
recognized as a medical system in 2010. The Tibetan examples offer
original data for re-thinking the Ayurvedic model, which classifies
medicines either as “classical formulas” or “proprietary medicines.”
This model raises questions on genre, authorship, and intertextuality
both historically and in the context of current pharmaceutical standardization and codification of formulas across Asia.
I compare aspects of rejuvenation in precious pill formulas with contemporary presentations of precious pills online and on published leaflets given out to patients in India and elsewhere. In Tibetan medical texts certain precious pills that contain the complex and processed mercury-sulfide ash called tsotel in addition to a large variety of other medicinal substances are presented as “precious pills” or rinchen rilbu, and only some of those are said to have rejuvenating effects on the body; most are primarily prescribed for specific diseases. The practice of giving precious pills to the healthy emerges more prominently in eighteenth to nineteenth century manuals on administering precious pills (Czaja 2015), which parallels the establishment of influential medical and monastic networks that promoted the making of tsotel and precious pills. I argue that precious pills have more recently widened their specific therapeutic target beyond that of medicine into becoming popular pills for rejuvenation, even if they do not contain tsotel, as part of pharmaceutical commodification. I also show how presentations of precious pills as “rejuvenating” are deeply linked to their availability.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol37/iss2/19
Endangered Knowledge,” held in Kathmandu, Nepal, in December 2011. An experiment in collaborative event
ethnography (CEE), this workshop brought together Tibetan medicine practitioners (amchi) from India, Nepal, and
Tibetan regions of the People’s Republic of China, with anthropologists who have been working with amchi for
decades. This workshop focused on practitioners who still compound and prescribe their own medicines, in an era
when such practitioners are declining in number due to rapid commoditization of Tibetan medicines, shifts toward
standardized mass production, institution-based education, and the implementation of pharmaceutical governance
regimes derived from biomedicine. The workshop aimed to encourage knowledge exchange between diverse practitioners
and generate new, collective, and more nuanced anthropological knowledge about Sowa Rigpa epistemology,
history, theory, and practice. Our method of choice was collaborative event ethnography formulated as a workshop
in the most literal sense of the word: a space where artisanal forms of praxis were honored and where material
things—medicines—were collectively made. This article discusses how this CEE experience departs at the level of
scope, structure, and implications from other collaborative, event-based ethnographic practice described in the anthropological
literature.
considered essential by Tibetan physicians to treat severe diseases. Making tsotel and precious pills in Tibet’s past were rare and expensive events. The Chinese take-over of Tibet in the 1950s, followed by the successive reforms, including the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), affected the opportunities to transmit the knowledge and practice of making tsotel. In this article, I discuss two Tibetan physicians, Tenzin Chödrak (1924–2001) and Troru Tsenam (1926– 2004), both of whom spent many years in Chinese prisons and labour camps, and their role in the transmission of the tsotel practice in a labour camp in
1977, contextualising these events with tsotel practices in Central and South Tibet in preceding decades. Based on two contemporary biographies, their descriptions of making tsotel will be analysed as well as the ways in which the biographies depicted these events. I argue that the ways of writing about
these tsotel events in the physicians’ biographies, while silencing certain lines of knowledge transmission, established an authoritative lineage of this practice. Both physicians had a decisive impact on the continuation of the lineage and the manufacturing of tsotel and precious pills from the 1980s onwards in both India and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
with a D.Phil. in Social Anthropology, researching longevity practices and concepts of the life-span in Tibetan societies in India (Gerke 2012a). I then taught at three universities in the USA and Germany, and pursued a post-doc at the
Humboldt University, Berlin, on detoxification methods in Tibetan pharmacology and on how ideas of toxicity are translated cross-culturally (2011-2015). Critical course discussions that we had at Oxford on efficacy made me look at issues of safety and helped me think anthropologically about toxicity. How can we study toxic ingredients of medicines with research methods specific to anthropology in the absence of laboratories and biomedical testing tools? Looking at changing anthropological approaches to efficacy and safety are my entry points for this article, which provides some of the groundwork necessary to address questions of how Tibetan doctors translate their ideas of toxicity and detoxification to a Western audience.
traced back to the thirteenth century in Tibet, are considered the pinnacle of Tibetan pharmacology. The commercial value of tsotel gives it a strong economic and social life
of its own. This paper analyses the social life of tsotel from an anthropological perspective and sketches key aspects of tsotel’s biography, which in one way or the other are linked to medical, political, and religious perceptions of mercury: tsotel events with their political and institutional agendas; the value of tsotel as a medical, religious, and political commodity; safety and toxicity debates; and tsotel’s religious and political efficacy. I argue that the social life of tsotel is increasingly linked to perceptions of toxicity and safety because of its chief ingredient, mercury, being contested in a globalised arena of tightened international regulations as well as the recent attention given to heavy metal
toxicity issues in Asian medicines. Also, several fundamental misconceptions of the substance of mercury itself, its processed form of mercury sulphide, and of the contamination of herbal ingredients with heavy metals will be highlighted. Examples are
based on ethnographic fieldwork with Tibetan medical practitioners and pharmacologists in India and Nepal.
The COVID-19 pandemic has offered an opportunity to revisit Asian medical ideas of contagion from fresh perspectives, textually, as well as through ethnographic research in societies in which pre-modern ideas of contagion are still part of lived medical practices. During the ARI workshop on religion, COVID-19 vaccines, and structures of trust, it became clear that issues of “faith in immunity” in Asian medical contexts cannot fully be understood without first researching underlying conceptions of contagion and epidemic disease that might affect trust in vaccines. This research poses several challenges, which we will address in an interdisciplinary project introduced below.
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/responding-to-an-unfolding-pandemic-asian-medicines-and-covid-19
The idea for this Hot Spots series emerged in early March 2020, as the epidemic was moving from Asia to Europe and North America. The essays presented here were written during the months of March and April 2020, and therefore roughly relate to events and debates unfolding during that time period of the pandemic. ....
“epistemic genre” (Pomata 2013) not only list ingredients
but also encode historical data of knowledge transmission.
Combining ethnographic fieldwork with Tibetan physicians and textual
analysis of Tibetan formula books dating back to the seventeenth
century that are still in use, I raise questions on how formulas as a
genre are a meeting point between continuity and change and directly
influence the transmission of medical knowledge and affect contemporary medical practice. Taking the example of the Tibetan “precious pill” Precious Old Turquoise 25, I ask how specific recipes have
been composed and passed on by Tibetan authors and contemporary
Tibetan physicians over time. I argue that in the context of Sowa
Rigpa (gso ba rig pa, “Science of Healing”), even today, the design of
formulas necessitates continuity, authenticity, continual interpretation,
reformulation, and personal “signatures” in the making of remedies,
now largely within the context of institutionalized knowledge
transmission. In India, this poses a challenge for the present codification
of formulas into a standardized pharmacopeia as currently required
for four medical traditions (Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, and
Homeopathy) registered under AYUSH (the Ministry of Ayurveda,
Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Sowa Rigpa, and Homoeopathy,
Government of India), under which Sowa Rigpa was officially
recognized as a medical system in 2010. The Tibetan examples offer
original data for re-thinking the Ayurvedic model, which classifies
medicines either as “classical formulas” or “proprietary medicines.”
This model raises questions on genre, authorship, and intertextuality
both historically and in the context of current pharmaceutical standardization and codification of formulas across Asia.
I compare aspects of rejuvenation in precious pill formulas with contemporary presentations of precious pills online and on published leaflets given out to patients in India and elsewhere. In Tibetan medical texts certain precious pills that contain the complex and processed mercury-sulfide ash called tsotel in addition to a large variety of other medicinal substances are presented as “precious pills” or rinchen rilbu, and only some of those are said to have rejuvenating effects on the body; most are primarily prescribed for specific diseases. The practice of giving precious pills to the healthy emerges more prominently in eighteenth to nineteenth century manuals on administering precious pills (Czaja 2015), which parallels the establishment of influential medical and monastic networks that promoted the making of tsotel and precious pills. I argue that precious pills have more recently widened their specific therapeutic target beyond that of medicine into becoming popular pills for rejuvenation, even if they do not contain tsotel, as part of pharmaceutical commodification. I also show how presentations of precious pills as “rejuvenating” are deeply linked to their availability.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol37/iss2/19
Endangered Knowledge,” held in Kathmandu, Nepal, in December 2011. An experiment in collaborative event
ethnography (CEE), this workshop brought together Tibetan medicine practitioners (amchi) from India, Nepal, and
Tibetan regions of the People’s Republic of China, with anthropologists who have been working with amchi for
decades. This workshop focused on practitioners who still compound and prescribe their own medicines, in an era
when such practitioners are declining in number due to rapid commoditization of Tibetan medicines, shifts toward
standardized mass production, institution-based education, and the implementation of pharmaceutical governance
regimes derived from biomedicine. The workshop aimed to encourage knowledge exchange between diverse practitioners
and generate new, collective, and more nuanced anthropological knowledge about Sowa Rigpa epistemology,
history, theory, and practice. Our method of choice was collaborative event ethnography formulated as a workshop
in the most literal sense of the word: a space where artisanal forms of praxis were honored and where material
things—medicines—were collectively made. This article discusses how this CEE experience departs at the level of
scope, structure, and implications from other collaborative, event-based ethnographic practice described in the anthropological
literature.
considered essential by Tibetan physicians to treat severe diseases. Making tsotel and precious pills in Tibet’s past were rare and expensive events. The Chinese take-over of Tibet in the 1950s, followed by the successive reforms, including the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), affected the opportunities to transmit the knowledge and practice of making tsotel. In this article, I discuss two Tibetan physicians, Tenzin Chödrak (1924–2001) and Troru Tsenam (1926– 2004), both of whom spent many years in Chinese prisons and labour camps, and their role in the transmission of the tsotel practice in a labour camp in
1977, contextualising these events with tsotel practices in Central and South Tibet in preceding decades. Based on two contemporary biographies, their descriptions of making tsotel will be analysed as well as the ways in which the biographies depicted these events. I argue that the ways of writing about
these tsotel events in the physicians’ biographies, while silencing certain lines of knowledge transmission, established an authoritative lineage of this practice. Both physicians had a decisive impact on the continuation of the lineage and the manufacturing of tsotel and precious pills from the 1980s onwards in both India and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
with a D.Phil. in Social Anthropology, researching longevity practices and concepts of the life-span in Tibetan societies in India (Gerke 2012a). I then taught at three universities in the USA and Germany, and pursued a post-doc at the
Humboldt University, Berlin, on detoxification methods in Tibetan pharmacology and on how ideas of toxicity are translated cross-culturally (2011-2015). Critical course discussions that we had at Oxford on efficacy made me look at issues of safety and helped me think anthropologically about toxicity. How can we study toxic ingredients of medicines with research methods specific to anthropology in the absence of laboratories and biomedical testing tools? Looking at changing anthropological approaches to efficacy and safety are my entry points for this article, which provides some of the groundwork necessary to address questions of how Tibetan doctors translate their ideas of toxicity and detoxification to a Western audience.
traced back to the thirteenth century in Tibet, are considered the pinnacle of Tibetan pharmacology. The commercial value of tsotel gives it a strong economic and social life
of its own. This paper analyses the social life of tsotel from an anthropological perspective and sketches key aspects of tsotel’s biography, which in one way or the other are linked to medical, political, and religious perceptions of mercury: tsotel events with their political and institutional agendas; the value of tsotel as a medical, religious, and political commodity; safety and toxicity debates; and tsotel’s religious and political efficacy. I argue that the social life of tsotel is increasingly linked to perceptions of toxicity and safety because of its chief ingredient, mercury, being contested in a globalised arena of tightened international regulations as well as the recent attention given to heavy metal
toxicity issues in Asian medicines. Also, several fundamental misconceptions of the substance of mercury itself, its processed form of mercury sulphide, and of the contamination of herbal ingredients with heavy metals will be highlighted. Examples are
based on ethnographic fieldwork with Tibetan medical practitioners and pharmacologists in India and Nepal.
Gerke, Barbara. 2019. "Material Presentations and Cultural Drug Translations of Contemporary Tibetan Precious Pills." In Knowledge and Context in the Tibetan Medical Tradition. PIATS 2016: Tibetan Studies: Proceedings of the Fourteenth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Bergen, 2016, edited by William McGrath, 337-367. Leiden: Brill.
This chapter centers on Tibetan Buddhist patterns and themes of healing and addresses the inter-relationship of medicine and religion in the practice of Tibetan medicine, also called Sowa Rigpa (gso ba rig pa), the “science of healing,” and how Buddhist rituals are employed to enhance the potency of medicines and to protect the pharmacy and the people working in it from accidents and obstacles during difficult manufacturing processes. Examples focus on the refinement of mercury in mercury sulphide ash for use in “precious pills” (rin chen ril bu). The chapter establishes an argument for a parallel between Buddhist ideas of “taming” demons into becoming protectors of the religious teachings and the pharmacological transformation of poisonous substances, especially the pharmacological practices of “taming” mercury into a potent elixir, and what this tells us about Tibetan medical approaches to what is considered “beneficial” and “harmful.”
Gerke, Barbara. 2015. "Of Matas, Jhakris, and other Healers: Fieldnotes on a Healing Event in Kalimpong, India." In Tibetan & Himalayan Healing. An Anthology for Anthony Aris, edited by Charles Ramble and Ulrike Roesler, 231-248. Kathmandu: Vajra Publications.
WITH: Yan Liu, SUNY Buffalo, HEALING WITH POISONS, on the use of poisons as potent medicines in medieval Chinese pharmacy;
Alisha Rankin, Tufts University, THE POISON TRIALS, on testing poison antidotes in early modern Europe.
Shigehisa Kuriyama (Moderator), David Arnold (Discussant), and Katharine Park (Respondent).
https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/catalog/book/746?lang=en
This rich ethnographic and socio-historical account uncovers how toxicity and safety are expressed transculturally in a globalizing world. For the first time, it unpacks the “pharmaceutical nexus” of mercury in Tibetan medicine (Sowa Rigpa) where, since the thirteenth century, it has mainly been used in the form of tsotel. Tsotel, an organometallic mercury sulfide compound, is added in small amounts to specific medicines to enhance the potency of other ingredients. In concordance with tantric Buddhist ideas, Tibetan medical practitioners confront and tame poisonous substances, and instead of avoiding or expelling them, transform them into potent medicines and elixirs.
Recently, the UN Environment Programme’s global ban on mercury, the Minamata Convention, has sparked debates on the use of mercury in Asian medicines. As Asian medical traditions increasingly intersect with biomedical science and technology, what is at stake when Tibetan medical practitioners in India and Nepal, researchers, and regulators negotiate mercury’s toxicity and safety? Who determines what is “toxic” and what is “safe,” and how? What does this mean for the future of traditional Asian medical and pharmaceutical practices?
In this one-day workshop the research teams will introduce the projects to each other and to interested audiences. The event is intended to highlight the medical focus at our department, stimulate exchange between the participating researchers, and to help finding new ways of collaboration and overlapping research interests.
How to better harness their collective strengths in order to further understanding of relationships between texts, knowledge, theory and practice in Asian medical traditions? How to overcome the Cartesian dichotomies that still inform our definitions of such categories? When, why and how do ethnographers read texts, or philologists observe/work with practitioners? How can these methodologies be combined so as to enrich our work as individuals, in teams, at conferences, and in co-authored publications? How to bridge the gaps between premodern writings and the (post)modern predicaments facing contemporary practitioners relying on such texts, as well as the researchers translating and interpreting them?
We invite papers from anthropological and philological perspectives, across the disciplines of South Asian Studies, Indology, Tibetan Studies, Anthropology, History, Political Science and Religious Studies, to debate and share experiences concerning disciplinary boundaries, fluidity, and the relationship between medical texts and practices.
Vienna, August 1-3, 2017
Co-hosted by the Dept. of South Asian, Tibet and Buddhist Studies, University of Vienna and the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Building on its historic strength in Tibet and South Asian Studies, Vienna has recently become an international hotspot for historical and anthropological research on Tibetan and South Asian medical and yoga traditions. Thus, there are currently four major international research projects working on topics ranging from South Asian longevity practices to the transnational Sowa Rigpa industry, from body images across Asia to Tibetan recipes, specifically of Precious Pills. This conference is organized collaboratively by all four projects to bring together local and international experts to showcase and further strengthen this collective expertise. The aim of this conference is to present and discuss historical, textual, and contemporary insights on the following key themes:
Longevity practices as a shared concern in South Asian medical, alchemical and yogic milieus: Longevity practices are described in a range of Indic literatures and seem to form an integral part of disciplines such as medicine, alchemy and yoga. We seek to examine in what ways and in which contexts longevity practices connect these soteriological and secular disciplines, and to explore how the various practices both reflect fundamental differences in aims and approaches between the different traditions and highlight their commonalities.
The emergence of a transnational Sowa Rigpa pharmaceutical industry in India, China, Mongolia, and Bhutan: How does a “traditional” pharmaceutical industry develop and function? What is the size and shape of the Sowa Rigpa industry in Asia, and what are its larger effects on local and regional economies, politics, environments, and public health? By exploring diverse aspects of the Sowa Rigpa industry, from the raw materials through pharmaceutical production to questions of identity and ownership, we aim to generate a new understanding of Sowa Rigpa and traditional medicine today.
Tibetan formulas explored through textual and ethnographic analysis: We want to discuss “biographies” of medicines (of Tibetan Precious Pills but also other popular formulas) and consider their textual history, ingredients, contemporary therapeutic use, their perceived socio-political, religious and medical efficacies, as well as their their contemporary production, knowledge transmission and therapeutic applications. Contributions should go beyond existing approaches of “things as commodities,” combining textual and ethnographic methods in a broad analysis of “biographies” of medicines and explore recipes that drive the Sowa Rigpa pharmaceutical industry today.
Images of the human being in Tibet and across Asia: Medical concepts give rise to and are built into certain frameworks embedded in cultural and religious contexts. Presentations will examine tensions arising from encounters between different frameworks, such as Buddhist and medical ideals described in the classical scriptures on the one hand and the reality of the diseased, suffering human being asking for help on the other. We will explore how conflicting biomedical and traditional concepts mutually stimulate and enrich one another, particularly in regard to their impact on patient safety and compliance.
The conference will address a wide variety of interdisciplinary contributions addressing textual, historical, ethnobotanical, and ethnographical aspects to all of these four broad topics.
Conference conveners:
Dagmar Wujastyk (ERC Starting Grant AyurYog)
Stephan Kloos (ERC Starting Grant RATIMED)
Barbara Gerke (FWF Lise-Meitner Senior Research Fellowship)
Katharina Sabernig (FWF project P26129-G21)
For ZOOM link see the poster.
3 p.m. (c.t.)
Department of South Asian, Tibetan and
Buddhist Studies, seminar room 1
Spitalgasse 2, Hof 2.7, 1090 Vienna
----------
For online participation
please register by 3 November:
[email protected]
SPECIAL ISSUE EDITOR: BARBARA GERKE.
SENIOR EDITORS: MONA SCHREMPF AND MARTA HANSON
This special issue of Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity presents nine papers on approaches to and perspectives on the use of mercury in ayurvedic and Tibetan medical traditions. This issue contributes to ongoing debates regarding the toxicity of mercury-containing Asian medical products. As the articles show, such debates are not only scientific in nature, but also have epistemological, legal, and political aspects. Six academic articles cover textual, ethnographic, and political science analysis on mercury in Ayurveda and Tibetan medicine. The section on ‘Legal Aspects’ covers the legislation of mercury-containing Asian medicines in the EU, and specifically in Germany. In ‘Field Notes’ an ayurvedic physician presents his experience with mercury processing in the form of a personal memoir, richly illustrated with photos depicting the equipment used to distill and process mercury. ‘Practice Reports’ presents a report on the processing of mercury in an ayurvedic setting.
These essays were written in March and April 2020.
https://himalayajournal.org/mainnews/himalaya-39-1-2019/
Tibetan Biography: Textuality, Community, and Authority in the Lineage of Tokden Shakya Shri. Lexington Books. 221 pp. 6 figures, index. Series "Studies in Modern Tibetan Culture." ISBN 978-0-73916519-5 (hardcover, 81USD).
The book under review is a part of Lexington Books' series "Studies in Modern Tibetan Culture." The author, Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa, has a background in Religious Studies and researched the interrelationships between textual biography and social community networks of the Tibetan Buddhist lineage holder and Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen master, Tokden Shakya Shri (1853–1919) from Latokh, which at the time was a kingdom and one of five polities in Kham, Eastern Tibet, and today is in Chamdo County in the Tibet Autonomous Region. She interviewed contemporary students and family of Shakya Shri as well as translated excerpts from the master's biography, the Garland of Flowers. The Tibetan text is not appended, but interested readers can refer to the complete translation of the
Garland of Flowers by Elio Guarisco (2009). An old black and white photo of the master, as well as photos of his community in Nepal and the stupas his followers helped to renovate, are included in the book. A map showing the regions of Shakya Shri's residences and spiritual influence would have been useful. ...