The History of the Tibetan Renaissance Course
Introduction
The History of the Tibetan Renaissance is a graduate level course devoted to the time period of the late tenth to fourteenth century, with an emphasis on the first three centuries (roughly 950 to 1250) corresponding to the onset of the "later dissemination" (phyi dar) of Buddhism into Tibet. This is a time period during which Buddhism comes to pervade Tibetan culture as it is assimilated on all registers into a distinctively Tibetan set of traditions. The course has been taught since the 1990s by David Germano at the University of Virginia.
It is currently being taught in the Spring of 2004 by Germano as part of a THDL History initiative led by Kurtis Schaeffer on the Blue Annals (deb ther sngon po). The Blue Annals is perhaps the most famous of Tibetan historical texts, and represents a pan-sectarian history of Buddhism in Tibet with a strong focus on precisely this time period. The course is thus based on its fifteen sections, each of which is devoted to a specific time period, sect, figure, or deity cult. The course overall is being structured as a THDL research workshop, with students doing detailed textual analysis of the Blue Annals in preparation for writing final interpretative essays on the time period. All materials generated by the course will be posted herein, but will also gradually go into the THDL History Collection as reviewed by Schaeffer and Germano.
The University of Virginia uses a number of different home grown course management software systems. The most pervasive is Toolkit, which provides instructors the ability to create automated home pages for their course with syllabi, discussion forum, scans of course materials and the like. On Toolkit's home page, you can enter RELB 549 for the present course, and with the time set at Spring 2004, to see its content. We also use a more specialized system known as E-Folio, which faciliates the posting of assignments and rich conversation back and forth as keyed to those assignments. You can see the class's home page on the E-Folio index under Spring 2004, RELB 549. E-Folio will also faciliate our experiment with "chat" technology, which we will use at the very least for communal e-office hours with the instructor. We plan to use THDL's own discussion forums for classroom dialogs over the Web, in part to help launch those discussion forums and show their rich possibilities. Finally, we will also be "blogging" to complement discussion forums with more personalized postings - if you don't know what a blog is, read below.