We need to refrain from unthinkingly grafting our own versions of history, biography, time, space, and religious experiences onto an entirely different world. As students of religion, we need to be more careful when attempting to understand Tibetan literature.
Samuel’s summary of our struggles with understanding Tibetan history is illuminating in its simplicity: it points out the obvious. They are not part of a world based on such sequences” (1993, 296).
As the anthropologist Geoffrey Samuel (1946–) explains in Civilized Shamans: “Constantly reincarnating do not fit comfortably into a linear historical sequence, but there is no reason why they should. Tibetan Buddhists live in a cosmology and maintain a worldview that cannot be easily fit into the standard Western definitions of scientific materialism.
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