This work is perhaps the first of its kind to explore Tibetan Buddhist practices that employ the act of seeing, looking, staring, or even not-seeing anything at all. This book speaks of metaphorical and actual seeing and it is argued that, in a number of Tibetan traditions, the eyes are considered to be ways to a transcendent form of seeing, thus moving beyond their metaphorical importance. It is not difficult to see the appeal of such a topic to prospective readers. Naked Seeing is a veritable tour de force of previously under- and unexplored Tibetan textual material from the so-called Tibetan Renaissance period. The author notes that this period was said to start in the late tenth century, thereby equating it with the later dissemination of Buddhist teachings in Tibet (Tib. phyi dar), but does not expand upon the periodization of this “later dissemination”. While the usage of the term “renaissance” is not uncontested, most historians agree that this period ended with the rise of the Sa skya-Mongol alliance in the thirteenth century.
