This extensive survey documents Tibetan society over five decades, including population structure in rural and urban areas, marriage and migration patterns, the maintenance of language and traditional culture, economic transitions relating to income and consumption habits, educational development, and the growth of civil society and social organizations. In addition to household surveys completed over twenty years, the book provides a systematic analysis of all available social and census data released by the Chinese government, and a thorough review of Western and Chinese literature on the topic. It is the first book on Tibetan society published in English by a mainland China scholar, and covers several sensitive issues in Tibetan studies, including population changes, Han migration into Tibetan areas, intermarriage patterns, and ethnic relations.--Ma Rong is a widely respected demographer and professor of sociology at Peking University. He spent five years in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, and was one of the first Chinese students to study in the US after Deng Xiaoping's reforms, receiving his doctorate degree from Brown University.-- "The academic study of Tibet still suffers from a lack of accurate data and restrictions on access to Tibet for research. This very useful analysis will increase the quality of the discussion and help to correct many inaccurate Western impressions of Tibet." - Gerard Postiglione, University of Hong Kong-
This book is a collection of Professor Ma Rong's papers on current and future ethnic relations in China. Some of the studies, presented in the book, are related to basic theories on ethnic relations, while others are specific issues he observed and identified while conducting surveys in different parts of the country. His papers are based on field research and China's current situations, which may shed some light on the theoretical and practical studies on ethnic relations in China.
The first English translation of a classic treatise on how the Tibetan practice of Dzogchen, or Great Perfection, is in fact the culmination of the path of Mahayana Buddhism. Rongzom Chökyi Zangpo wrote this treatise in the eleventh century during the renaissance of Buddhism in Tibet that was spurred by the influx of new translations of Indian Buddhist texts, tantras, and esoteric transmissions from India. For political and religious reasons, adherents of the “new schools” of Tibetan Buddhism fostered by these new translations cast the older tradition of lineages and transmissions as impure and decadent. Rongzompa composed the work translated here in order to clearly and definitively articulate how Dzogchen was very much in line with the wide variety of sutric and tantric teachings espoused by all the Tibetan schools. Using the kinds of philosophic and linguistic analyses favored by the new schools, he demonstrates that the Great Perfection is indeed the culmination and maturation of the Mahāyāna, the Great Vehicle. The central topic of the work is the notion of illusory appearance, for when one realizes deeply that all appearances are illusory, one realizes also that all appearances are in that respect equal. The realization of the equality of all phenomena is said to be the Great Perfection approach to the path, which frees one from both grasping at, and rejecting, appearances. However, for those unable to remain effortlessly within the natural state, in the final chapter Rongzompa also describes how paths with effort are included in the Great Perfection approach.
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