Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro by Sarah H. Jacoby (review)

In Tibetan studies, we often wait years for the publication of groundbreaking research because the methodological skills and scholarly networks required for in-depth linguistic and historical analysis take that long to develop. Today, as market pressures demand condensed graduate careers and pithy academic writing, such work is arguably increasingly rare. In this context, Sarah Jacoby’s new monograph exploring the life and times of Sera Khandro (1892–1940), the Tibetan woman and Buddhist visionary or “treasure revealer” (Tib. gter ston) who lived in the tumultuous sociopolitical milieu of turn-of-the-century eastern Tibet (Golok), is an outstanding and highly welcome achievement. At 456 pages, Jacoby’s five chapters, framed by a short and accessible introduction and epilogue, allow us to luxuriate in the detail and depth of a well-written story and a compelling analysis, all based on virtuoso translations of both Sera Khandro’s own life writings and those of her contemporaries and interlocutors. Further, the almost miraculous length Jacoby is afforded here allows her to include extensive citations from the translated works themselves so that her authorial voice shares almost equal space with those of Sera Khandro and other Tibetan Buddhist writers. This is one of the most “dialogic” (in the Bakhtinian sense of “multivoiced”) of scholarly accounts I have read in years.

Jacoby’s empathetic yet incisive writerly style belongs in the illustrious lineage of feminist ethnographic and religious studies that have sought to highlight the paradigm-shifting perspectives of subjects positioned at the margins of gendered mainstreams. This is particularly timely in Tibetan Buddhist studies because the tradition’s well-documented androcentrism has been mirrored in the scholarship, such that detailed studies of Tibetan women’s Buddhist experience, much less ones that take gender seriously as an analytic tool, are few and far between. Jacoby’s book joins a recent spate of publications offering translations of Tibetan women’s autobiographies. Hers, however, is perhaps the most innovative and intimate window onto the gendered nature of Tibetan Buddhist lives. This study is perfectly positioned to bring the margins to light not only because it analyzes the work of a remarkably prolific lay female visionary who struggled for legitimacy and recognition in Golok’s competitive, male-dominated world of tantric treasure revealers. This account of Sera Khandro’s contentious life journey as a young, perhaps half-Mongolian noblewoman who escaped an arranged marriage in Lhasa to follow her prophesied guru and tantric consort back east to his homeland in Golok’s fiercely autonomous pastoralist communities also gives us an exceedingly rare glimpse of the ethnic, regional, and Buddhist sectarian frontier zones of early twentieth-century Tibetan communities.

Jacoby’s sophisticated approach to literary analysis, laid out in admirably accessible terms in the introduction, is crafted with the aim of understanding the “narrative strategies” through which Sera Khandro presents and thereby works to constitute her “autobiographical self” in the context of Tibetans’ great reverence for Buddhist genres of life writing (Tib. rnam thar, rang rnam) (2). Most important, drawing on an eclectic array of literary theorists both within Tibetan studies and outside it, Jacoby calls for a critical distance from Western notions of an autonomous, individual self, a presumably authentic and real historical self extractable from the embellishments of hagiography. She advocates instead for understanding the figure of Sera Khandro as a profoundly “relational self” constituted within an ever-shifting network of “auspicious connections” (Tib. rten ’brel) between humans and their nonhuman (divine, demonic, animal) interlocutors and environments (11, 78, 96). Our goal as readers, Jacoby argues, is thus to “listen to conversations” that Sera Khandro stages, conversations that include both humans and nonhumans as equally social participants (132).

Such a nuanced approach to a Tibetan metaphysics of personhood and presence, we learn, is crucial for grasping the politics of voice, authorship, and legitimacy facing the would-be...