Religious Thinkers as Co-Theorists: The Future of Critical Theory on Religion

In this paper, I will take up the 19th century Tibetan polymath Jamgön Kongtrul as a theorist of religion. Kongtrul's encyclopedic Treasury of Knowledge places the "inner science" of Buddhism alongside medicine, astrology, logic, and other Tibetan disciplines as intellectual and somatic crafts, locating all knowledge, religious and otherwise, in the relational transformation of persons rather than the correspondence of facts to an objective reality. Pursuing impartiality (rimé), Kongtrul presents a fractally multiplying series of accounts of everything from architecture to Buddhist soteriology, treating each contradictory possibility as an integral whole. Like his European parallels - whose desire for objective and universal knowledge still runs through Religious Studies – Kongtrul’s own hierarchical preferences shape his project. But in his insistence that relational particularity is what makes each way of knowing effective, Kongtrul offers us a different epistemic path. 

How does desire spatialize capital’s large-scale motion into Asia? Working in the Tibetan margins of global capital, this paper turns to the work of a Buddhist monk named Shérab Tendar (Shes rabs bstan dar, b. 1968). A prolific and controversial public intellectual from Qinghai in the PRC, Shérab Tendar relentlessly critiques rationalist desire (Tib. chags pa) at the heart of “Western economics” (nub pa’i dpal ‘byor rig pa) and the social scientific theorizing of the human more generally. He does so under the umbrella of an elaborate “Buddhist economics” (nang pa’i dpal ‘byor rig pa) rooted in a plethora of Buddhist scriptural sources and the alchemical logics of tantric transmutation and purity. Thinking with Shérab Tendar and his economy of tantric desire, this paper reconsiders the putative transparency of the secular and the exceptional neutrality of capitalism as independently articulated projects of modernity.

This paper presents textual ethnography as a collaborative way of making theory with Tibetan experts. Based on multi-year fieldwork among Tibetan communities in India, I suggest four principles of textual ethnographic work as a decolonial method for producing collaborative knowledge with and about Tibetan religious experts. I elevate Tibetan pedagogies and conceptual categories—such as lung (ལུང་།) reading transmission, samaya (དམ་ཚིག) commitments, and “ways of seeing” (མཐོང་ཚུལ།) as tools in a theoretical kit to be harnessed for religious studies beyond the purview of Buddhist traditions. The paper argues for research conducted in Tibetan and sustained through reciprocity and long-term presence, and it uses those commitments to rethink textual communities, religious authority, and gender in Do Khyentsé’s autobiography. Rather than romanticizing insider perspectives, the paper models multilingual, practice‑attuned partnership in which Tibetan interlocutors are recognized—and engaged—as co‑authors of theory.

This paper examines theories of body and embodiment in Tibetan Great Perfection (rdzogs chen) literature, focusing on transcorporeality, human bodies enmeshed in their worlds. Its primary source is The Heart Essence of the Ḍākinīs (mkha' 'gro snying thig), revealed by Pema Ledreltsal (pad+ma las 'brel rtsal, 1291–1315/17). In a world constituted by gnosis (ye shes), the authors of The Heart Essence of the Ḍākinīs theorized embodiment as porous, permeable, contagious, and enmeshed. The scripture regards bodies as interpenetrating other human bodies, divine bodies, elemental forces, and planetary cycles. Attending to this scripture's alterity on its own terms, the paper employs a decolonial framework that resists assimilating indigenous Buddhist categories into Western European philosophical norms. Instead, it treats the authors of this scripture as theorists of embodiment, whose work carries implications for both Buddhist studies and new materialism.

This paper examines the role of contemporary Tibetan Buddhist intellectuals as contributors to theoretical reflection about religion. In much of the academic study of religion, scholars have argued that theoretical analysis must be conducted from a critical distance outside religious traditions. In contrast, this paper argues that Tibetan Buddhist scholar-practitioners actively participate in theorizing religion from within their own traditions. Drawing on the Tibetan ideal of the khedrup (scholar-adept), it identifies three configurations of modern Buddhist intellectuals: traditional lineage holders engaged in interdisciplinary dialogue, hybrid scholar-practitioners who combine academic training with recognized religious authority, and academic scholars whose Buddhist practice informs their research. Figures such as the Dalai Lama, Anne Klein, and John Dunne illustrate how Tibetan Buddhist thinkers reinterpret doctrines, authority structures, and ethical practices in conversation with contemporary academic and scientific discourse. Recognizing them as theorists expands our understanding of how religious traditions generate critical reflection on religion.

What happens when we read Tibetan Buddhist dance masters not as informants about a local ritual practice, but as performance theorists whose conceptual frameworks challenge foundational assumptions about performance? To engage with this question, this paper turns to cham yik ('cham yig), or dance manuals, a genre of Tibetan Buddhist ritual literature devoted to monastic tantric dance.  Though they are most often thought of as choreographic notations, I argue that cham yik can also be understood as discursive arenas in which Tibetan scholars theorized performance itself. Reading them this way means not requiring the imposition of any Western theoretical grammar to draw out or make sense of these theories.  Rather, it only requires extending to them the same critical attention we have long given to canonical figures in the fields of religion and performance studies and that we remain open to having our assumptions unsettled in the process. 

This paper examines the legacy of Mary S. Slusser, an American scholar of Nepali art, and her role in the acquisition and relocation of Nepali cultural “artifacts” to Western institutions. Contending that Slusser’s knowledge claims legitimized intellectual and cultural dispossession, we explore three interrelated issues: the problematic claims to epistemic neutrality and authority in academic praxis, the tendency of such authority to overlook ethical dimensions inherent in knowledge claims, and the enduring colonial logic that informs scholarly approaches to the study of religion. Drawing on Buddhist teachings on śūnyatā (emptiness), the paper challenges Slusser’s materialist ontology, arguing that her work is both epistemologically flawed and ethically fraught. We propose a decolonial reparative model based on the Buddhist concept of upāya (skillful means) to challenge hierarchies of knowledge that systematically reproduce the non-white Other as objects of study and spectacle, while enabling Western institutions to evade ethical responsibility.

This paper situates the Tibetan concept of the “dream bardo” (rmi lam bar do) not as a subsidiary post-mortem stage, but as a theoretical model of habitually constructed experiential reality. Drawing on Prajñāpāramitā, Yogācāra, and tantric sources, it reconceptualizes consciousness as a trainable domain structured by karmic imprints (bag chags), in which a subtle “habit-body” (bag chags kyi lus) operates. Extending intermediate states beyond death, the dream bardo encompasses waking, meditative, and dream experience as continuous and transformable modes of awareness. It further analyzes the body, temporality, and practices of the dream bardo, where dreaming functions as an epistemology of illusion and a site of cultivation. By proposing bardo as process ontology and intermediate states as liminal thresholds, this framework offers new analytical tools for the study of religion. In dialogue with phenomenology and cognitive science, it challenges reductive models of dreaming and contributes to the decolonization of theoretical discourse.