ABSTRACT
Within the eighteenth century, the formative period for modern Tibetan history, Tibetan aristocratic literati started to experiment with literary forms and introduced new secular elements to the Tibetan genres of life writing. The study of the Biography of Doring Paṇḍitas, which exemplifies the new form of secular life writing, demonstrates how its author Doring Tenzin Penjor (b. 1760) carefully combines well-known narrative elements such as genealogy, autobiography, and memoir to establish a novel legitimation strategy that is based solely on secular authority.
