Yijin LiUndergraduate Humanities Honors Fellow

Yijin Li is an undergraduate student majoring in Art History and Religion.

His Honors Thesis research in the Emory Art History Department, titled "Assembly of Deities: The Tibetan Eighteenth-century Reimagination of Bardo," centers a series of post-eighteenth-century thangkas featured by the rare occurrence of the assembly of one hundred deities. These assembly-of-deities thangkas, often associated with the well-known fourteenth-century literature Bardo Thodol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead), were used as pedagogical tools for teaching and learning the bardo doctrine, images of concentration during meditation practice, and ritual objects in the funeral rites. Li’s study questions these works’ association with one particular fourteenth-century text, explains their function in Buddhist tantric practices, and reconstructs an eighteenth-century view of the bardo scene.