Echoes of Enlightenment: The Life and Legacy of the Tibetan Saint Sonam Peldren

Echoes of Enlightenment: The Life and Legacy of the Tibetan Saint Sonam Peldren

Echoes of Enlightenment explores the issues of gender and sainthood raised by the recently discovered "liberation story" of the fourteenth-century Tibetan female Buddhist practitioner Sönam Peldren. Born in 1328, Sönam Peldren spent most of her adult life as a nomad in eastern Tibet until her death in 1372. She is believed to have been illiterate, lacking religious education, and unconnected to established religious institutions. For that reason, and because as a woman her claims of religious authority would have been constantly questioned, Sönam Peldren's success in legitimizing her claims of divine identity appear all the more remarkable. Today the site of her death is recognized as sacred by local residents. Suzanne Bessenger draws on the new-found biography of the saint to understand how the written record of the saint's life is shaped both by the hagiographical agendas of its multiple authors and by the dictates of the genres of Tibetan religious literature, including biography and poetry. She considers Sönam Peldren's enduring historical legacy as a fascinating piece of Tibetan history that reveals much about the social and textual machinations of saint production. Finally, she identifies Sönam Peldren as one of the earliest recorded instances of a historical Tibetan woman successfully using the uniquely Tibetan hermeneutic of deity emanation to achieve religious authority. "Bessenger contributes to the growing subfield of Tibetan Life writing but also more broadly to the field of religion and gender. Scholars interested in the social construction of sainthood, literary analysis as a tool of historical study, and representations of gender in religious literature will find much that will be useful to them. Because of its general introduction and accessible prose, the book can also profitably be assigned, in addition to graduate students in the field, to graduate students interested in religion and gender in non-Buddhist contexts or to advanced undergraduates in a Buddhism and gender class. In short, I recommend this fine book and look forward to Bessenger's future work on this and other projects." -- Catherine Hartmann, Harvard University, H NET Rreviews " Echoes of Enlightenment traces the once lost life and works of a contemplative woman in pre-modern Tibet. Through Bessenger's fine writing we have the chance to hear an important Buddhist voice, one that was clearly prominent and influential in its day, yet rarely carries through history's censored record. Sönam Peldren will become a well-regarded member of what is still a small group: Tibetan women whose stories, whose songs, whose brilliance were preserved for future appreciation."-Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Professor and Department Chair, Department of Religious Studies, University of Virginia "Bessenger contributes to the field of gender and religion, not only in bringing to light another female Buddhist saint from the Tibetan literary record, but also by capably analyzing complex representational strategies, ever cautious about what can and cannot be surmised from hagiographic sources in the absence of other contextualizing information."-- Reading Religion Explores the issues of gender and sainthood raised by the discovery of a previously unpublished "liberation story" of the fourteenth-century Tibetan female Buddhist practitioner Sönam Peldren. Suzanne M. Bessenger is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Randolph College. Her research explores Tibetan Buddhist biographies, cults of saints, and conceptions of gender. She lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her family.