The Holy Land Reborn

“A fascinating work of scholarship on the Tibetan obsession with the ‘holy land’ of India, at once entertaining and edifying. Even that most stable-seeming of realities, physical location itself, is here shown to be a product of cultural creation. In this case what is more at issue than the Indian subcontinent itself is how the imagination of its Buddhist sacred sites shaped the landscape of Tibetan Buddhism, on the other side of the Himalayas.”

“It has been repeated endlessly that for Tibetans, India is a ‘holy land,’ the place of origin of their Buddhist faith. Toni Huber has delved behind cliches and slogans and explored the cultural and historical realities of Tibet’s relations with India in the past as well as its present-day transformations. His book is a fascinating contribution to the study of Tibetan Buddhism, and to the history of religions and ideas in Asia in general. He cloaks his erudition in a lucid and eminently readable text, imparting new insights to the reader, counterbalancing prevalent facile and romantic ideas about Tibet.”

“The transformation of fluid space into bounded place, with knife-edged and therefore inevitably bloody borders, has been the work of modernity. In this engaging metageography of southern Asian Buddhism, Toni Huber rediscovers another world—India as a Tibetan place—demonstrating the deep, if sometimes confused and contested, connections that Tibetans have reinvented over ten centuries, whether through travel visions, pilgrimages, or exile. He thereby provides an exquisite demonstration of the fact that the certitudes by which people live their lives are as real and consequential as the hard truths of modern science.”