UC Berkeley professor Jacob Dalton's book The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism wins multiple awards

 April 2013

BERKELEY, CA - Group in Buddhist Studies faculty member Jacob Dalton has been honored with two awards for his first book, The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism (Yale University Press, 2011). The book was the winner of the 2013 E. Gene Smith Book Prize on Inner Asia given by the China and Inner Asian Council. In addition, the book won the 2013 Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize sponsored by the South Asia Council. Both Councils are associated with the Association for Asian Studies. Finally, the book was shortlisted for the 2012 Academy of Religion Book Awards in the Historical Study of Religion category.

The Taming of the Demons examines mythic and ritual themes of violence, demon taming, and blood sacrifice in Tibetan Buddhism. Taking as its starting point Tibet's so-called age of fragmentation (842 to 986 C.E.), the book draws on previously unstudied manuscripts discovered in the "library cave" near Dunhuang, on the old Silk Road. These ancient documents, it argues, demonstrate how this purportedly inactive period in Tibetan history was in fact crucial to the Tibetan assimilation of Buddhism, and particularly to the spread of violent themes from tantric Buddhism into Tibet at the local and the popular levels. Having shed light on this "dark age" of Tibetan history, the second half of the book turns to how, from the late tenth century onward, the period came to play a vital symbolic role in Tibet, as a violent historical "other" against which the Tibetan Buddhist tradition defined itself.

More information can be found at the Yale University Press website: http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300153927