Dan Hirshberg, assistant professor of religion, has been awarded Honorable Mention for his first monograph, Remembering the Lotus-Born: Padmasambhava in the History of Tibet’s Golden Age (Wisdom Publications, 2016), from the Association for Asian Studies.

The E. Gene Smith Inner Asia Book Prize, offered annually, honors outstanding and innovative scholarship across discipline and country of specialization for a book on Inner Asia published during the preceding year. There is only one prize, and occasionally one Honorable Mention, awarded each year.

Founded in 1941 and now with over 7000 members world-wide, the Association for Asian Studies is the largest scholarly, non-political, non-profit professional organization of its kind. It is also a member of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

Dan Hirshberg, assistant professor of religion, delivered a paper titled “Spontaneous Presence: The Rapid Normalization of Padmasambhava’s Iconography in Image (and Text)” at McGill University’s School of Religious Studies (Montréal, Quebec, Canada). Drawn from research he is pursuing for his Jepson Fellowship, this paper focuses on the earliest extant paintings of a renowned 8th ce. master of esoteric Buddhism, and compares them against textual descriptions in Tibetan biographies and liturgies from the same era.

Remembering the Lotus-Born, the recent monograph by Dan Hirshberg, assistant professor of religion, was reviewed in Reading Religion for the American Academy of Religion.

Dan Hirshberg, assistant professor of religion, presented a paper titled “Himalayan Syncretism and the Emergence of Padmasambhava as Rdo rje gro lod” for the Tibet Center, East Asia Center, and Buddhist Studies Group at the University of Virginia (March 15, 2017). Relying primarily on comparative analysis of 12th-14th century Tibetan hagiographies and liturgies, as well as iconographical analysis of painting and statuary, this paper extends beyond the initial apotheosis of Padmasambhava (8th ce.), the subject of Hirshberg’s recent book, to his subsequent elaboration and widespread popularization as the Second Buddha in Tibet.

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Dan Hirshberg, Assistant Professor of Religion, presented new research in a paper titled, “A Yogin’s Retirement: Visionary Tourism in Nyang ral’s Twilight Years,” at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. For the panel, “Imagination and Visualization in Tibetan Buddhism,” which was cosponsored by the Tibetan/Himalayan and Tantric Studies groups, he explored subjective depictions of the acute shift from contrived visualization practice into dissociative visionary excursions through the buddha realms.