The Blue Annals is a landmark in the historical literature of Tibet composed by a well known scholar and translator Gos lo-tsa-ba-gZon-nu dpal (1392-1481 A.D.). It is the main source of information for all later historical compilations in the Land of Snows . This work is invaluable inasmuch as it establishes a firm chronology of events of Tibetan history and works out in detail the list of the names of famous religious teachers and their spiritual lineage. The work is divided into fifteen chapters, each dedicated to the history of a particular school or sect of Tibetan Buddhism. It provides a comparative study of the chronological data given by T`ang Annals, Blue Annals, and Tunhuang chronicles. The Blue Annals appears to be a faithful reproduction of the list given in the T`ang Annals with minor differences. The book concludes with the portrayal of the origin, etc. of the communities of the four schools. It contains indexes for Sutras and Sastras, Personal Names and Book Titles and Personal Names (Tibetan), etc.

In the tradition of Iron and Silk and Touch the Dragon, Jamie Zeppa’s memoir of her years in Bhutan is the story of a young woman’s self-discovery in a foreign land. It is also the exciting début of a new voice in travel writing. When she left for the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan in 1988, Zeppa was committing herself to two years of teaching and a daunting new experience. A week on a Caribbean beach had been her only previous trip outside Canada; Bhutan was on the other side of the world, one of the most isolated countries in the world known as the last Shangri-La, where little had changed in centuries and visits by foreigners were restricted. Clinging to her bags full of chocolate, hair conditioner and Immodium, she began the biggest challenge of her life, with no idea she would fall in love with the country and with a Bhutanese man, end up spending nine years in Bhutan, and begin a literary career with her account of this transformative journey. At her first posting in a remote village of eastern Bhutan, she is plunged into an overwhelmingly different culture with squalid Third World conditions and an impossible language. Her house has rats and fleas and she refuses to eat the local food, fearing the rampant deadly infections her overly protective grandfather warned her about. Gradually, however, her fear vanishes. She adjusts, begins to laugh, and is captivated by the pristine mountain scenery and the kind students in her grade 2 class. She also begins to discover for herself the spiritual serenity of Buddhism. A transfer to the government college of Sherubtse, where the housing conditions are comparatively luxurious and the students closer to her own age, gives her a deeper awareness of Bhutan’s challenges: the lack of personal privacy, the pressure to conform, and the political tensions. However, her connection to Bhutan intensifies when she falls in love with a student, Tshewang, and finds herself pregnant. After a brief sojourn in Canada to give birth to her son, Pema Dorji, she marries Tshewang and makes Bhutan her home for another four years. Zeppa’s personal essay about her culture shock on arriving in Bhutan won the 1996 CBC/Saturday Night literary competition and appeared in the magazine. She flew home to accept the prize, where people encouraged her to pursue her writing. Her letters from Bhutan also featured on CBC’s Morningside. The book that grew out of this has been published in Canada and the United States to ecstatic reviews, followed by British, German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish editions. Although cultural differences finally separated Jamie and Tshewang in 1997 while she was writing the book and she returned to Canada, she will always feel at home in Bhutan. Zeppa shares her compelling insights into this land and culture, but Beyond the Sky and the Earth is more than a travel book. With rich, spellbinding prose and bright humour, it describes a personal journey in which Zeppa acquires a deeper understanding of what it means to leave one’s home behind, and undergoes a spiritual transformation.

The four works included in this collection have enjoyed a rather chequered career. They originally formed the second volume of the doctoral thesis Michael Aris submitted in 1978 to the University of London. They have been included because of their value as crucial source material on the formative era of Bhutanese history, as they cover the entire period leading to the full emergence of the Bhutanese theocracy. Their relative brevity as compared with the other major works relevant to this period further suggested the convenience of including them as a group of inter-related 'minor' texts. While the first two works in this collection have never before been available to modern scholars, and are indeed hardly known even in Bhutan, the next two (which include a text translated from Portuguese) have been partially known from the works of John Claude White (Sikkim and Bhutan-Twenty-one years on the North-East Frontier 1887-1908, London) and C. Wessels (Early Jesuit Travelers in Central Asia, The Hague 1924.

First published in 1989. This book includes the Tibetan Buddhist hagiography and concentrates on the lives of Pemalingpa (1450-1521) and the Sixth Dalai Lama (1683-1706). One of the main purposes of this study is to communicate the human qualities of these saints to a rather broader audience.

Unmatched in originality, breadth, and scope, The Routledge History of Happiness features chapters that explore the history, anthropology, and psychology of happiness across the globe. Through a chronological approach that ranges from the Classical and Postclassical to the twenty-first century, this volume balances intellectual-history treatments and wider efforts to deal with relevant popular culture and experience, including consumerism. It explores how and why the history of happiness has emerged in recent decades, as well as psychological and social science approaches to happiness, with a history of how relevant psychological research has unfolded. Chapters examine early cultural traditions concerning happiness, including material on Buddhist and Chinese traditions, and how they continue to influence ideas about happiness in the present day. Overall, each section emphasises wide geographical coverage, with particular attention paid to East Asia, Latin America, Europe, Russia, and Africa. The Routledge History of Happiness is of great use to all undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in the global history of emotions.

Published in conjunction with a 2003 exhibition co-organized by the Columbus Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this hefty, oversize (10x13 catalogue features approximately 160 powerful masterpieces of Indian, Nepalese, Tibetan, Chinese, and Mongolian art produced over the pa