Nicole Willock

Religious Studies doctoral candidate and 2010-2011 Dissertation-Year Fellow

I am a dual PhD Candidate in Religious Studies and the Department of Central Eurasian Studies. My focus within the field of Tibetan Studies is on monastic scholars who played a role in the establishment of modern Tibetan studies in the People’s Republic of China based on their monastic educations.

As I am in the final stages of writing my dissertation, I am particularly grateful for the Department of Religious Studies dissertation grant in order to focus on writing the final chapters of in this coming year. My dissertation entitled The Life of a Tibetan Buddhist Scholar in Modern China: In Pursuit of Knowledge, examines the life and work of the Tibetan monastic scholar A lags Tshe tan Zhabs drung ‘Jigs med rig pa’i blo gros (1910-1985, from here on Alak Zhabdrung). Considered one of the three great scholars of twentieth century Tibet, Alak Zhabdrung reclaimed and regenerated Tibetan Studies at a time of unprecedented social and political change, in the wake of the political campaigns associated with the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). By focusing on the discourse of a Tibetan Buddhist intellectual, this dissertation aims to engage with Tibetan epistemologies in the formation of the People's Republic of China.

Alak Zhabdrung held complex positions. He navigated Tibetan Buddhist discourse, shifting political and social policies of the Chinese Communist Party as well as local beliefs and practices. This dissertation examines Tibetan Buddhist agency in both resisting and complying with the intrusion of Chinese Communist policy into local religious and cultural heritage.  Alak Zhabdrung’s autobiographical life narrative, one of the main primary sources for my work, privileges Tibetan forms of knowledge, and thus shows how Tibetan Buddhist thought stimulates both new possibilities and contradictions in the formation of the Chinese Nation and contemporary forms of Buddhist practice.