Premodern Textual Studies | Great Perfection | Digital Humanities | Artificial Intelligence

I am currently a Lecturer at Stanford University where I also received my PhD (2024), specializing in Buddhist tantra, specifically the tradition known as Heart Essence Great Perfection. My first manuscript recovers a previously untranslated scripture, titled, the Secret Tantra of the Sun: the Blazing Luminous Matrix of Samantabhadrī ༼ཀློང་གསལ་འབར་མ་ཉི་མའི་གསང་རྒྱུད་༽ that became the source scripture of an important strand of the Heart Essence tradition. Tantra of the Sun is the first foundational Heart Essence scripture to feature a feminine Buddha narrator: Samantabhadrī. In my manuscript, I analyze the various strategies used by the tradition to elevate this scripture, and in the process, I show how pre-modern Buddhist communities imagined time, authority, and gender. My research has been supported by: Stanford’s Gerald J. Lieberman Fellowship, Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), the Asian Pacific American Religious Research Initiative (APARRI), the Khyentse Foundation, and the TT and WF Chao Fellowship in Buddhist Studies, among others.

I am committed to making the study of Buddhism and other domains of knowledge more accessible to a wider audience through innovative projects in technology and the arts. I previously built an intertextual heatmap to trace the citational history of the Tantra of the Sun throughout an important Treasure cycle called the Heart Essence of the Dakinis. I also created a virtual reality (VR) experience to present the three lineage transmissions of Great Perfection history. I am currently developing a web version of the application. See this 2024 interview at Stanford to learn more these two projects. Thank you to Simon Wiles and Aftab Hafeez for your help with the heatmap. Thank you to Aftab Hafeez for prototyping the VR experience.

My engagement in the digital humanities, coupled with my exposure to Silicon Valley for over seven years, led me to my second project which brings Buddhist philosophical categories into dialogue with contemporary debates on artificial intelligence ethics.

DISSERTATION ABSTRACT: My dissertation seeks to understand what modes of Buddhist temporality are available for us to consider the question of how to liberate from repeated cycles of suffering, or samsara. Using a previously unstudied Heart Essence (Tibetan: snying thig) scripture called the Tantra of the Sun, that features a feminine Buddha speaking to a feminine audience of non-human dakinis, I argue that this Tantra performs multiple temporalities on its readers, inviting us to experience the pivotal moment of straying from primordial gnosis into samsara existence as an expansive creative act in which infinite possibilities for liberation co-emerge within every moment. The Tantra of the Sun’s impact on the contemplative traditions associated with the Great Perfection (Tibetan: rdzogs chen) lineage of Tibetan Buddhism has been monumental, and yet no one has ever translated it or traced its textual history. My dissertation not only provides the first ever full-length translation and study of this important text, but it also examines the proliferation of the feminine that characterizes the language of Tantra of the Sun and is further mirrored in the female figures associated with its revelatory history. By doing so, I will show how Buddhist identities were fluidly reconfigured by rewriting the past, in this case, Tibet’s Imperial Age, in order to expand the repertoire of what constituted authoritative scripture in the present. My complete dissertation may be downloaded from the Stanford Libraries here.

Language Skills

English: mother tongue

Mandarin Chinese: fluent

French: advanced

Classical Tibetan & Classical Chinese: advanced

Modern Tibetan: good

Sanskrit: reading