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Join us for a lecture by Catherine Hartmann, University of Wyoming on the topic of her new book:

Making the Invisible Real: Practices of Seeing in Tibetan Buddhism

Friday, April 10th
4pm in the CACE Building, CU ¶¶Òõ´«Ã½ÔÚÏß

How can a person learn to see a mountain as a divine mandala, especially when, to the ordinary eye, the mountain looks like a pile of rocks and snow? This is the central challenge of Tibetan pilgrimage — and a window into one of the most pressing questions in the study of religion: how do religious traditions create and sustain belief in ordinarily invisible beings and landscapes? Drawing on Tibetan pilgrimage literature spanning the 13th to 20th centuries, including foundational narratives of holy places, polemical debates about the value of pilgrimage, written guides to holy sites, advice texts, and personal diaries, this talk explores how the Tibetan pilgrimage tradition challenges pilgrims to see beyond ordinaryÌýperception. It argues thatÌýthe pilgrimage tradition does not simply assume that pilgrims experience this sacred landscape as real, but instead leads pilgrims to adopt deliberate practices of seeing: ways of looking at and interacting with the world that shape their experience of the holy mountain.

This event is sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies with support from the Tibet Himalaya Initiative.

Catherine Hartmann is an assistant professor of Religious Studies and a scholar of the history of Buddhism at the University of Wyoming. Her research engages how religion shapes our experience of the world, and in the practices religions develop to transform that experience. Dr. Hartmann's primary research project is about intellectual history of pilgrimage in Tibet, but she is also interested in Buddhist ethics, as well as Buddhist approaches to addiction and recovery.

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