2015-2016 Lecture Series

2015-2016 Lecture Series Events

2015 Sep 21

September 21 - Heather Blair

Date: 

Monday, September 21, 2015, 4:30pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

Sever Hall 202

Hell is Hilarious! Buddhist Hell and Secularity in Post-War Japanese Picture Books

Heather Blair, Associate Professor, Indiana University

 

Monday, September 21, 4:30 pm

Sever Hall 202 (see ma

2015 Nov 10

November 10 - Rudolf G. Wagner

Date: 

Tuesday, November 10, 2015, 4:30pm

Location: 

McFadden Room, Barker Center 24

Translating and Explaining: Early Central Asian and Chinese Commentaries to the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra

Rudolf G. Wagner, Senior Professor, Chinese Studies, Heidelberg University, Cluster "Asia and Europe"; Asssociate, John K. Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University

 

Tuesday, November 10, 4:30 pm

McFadden Room, Barker Center 24

(see map

 

Abstract: The Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra has met with an enthusiastic response in China with no less than four translations and a stream of manuscripts preserved in Dunhuang and Turfan. The figure of the “householder” Vimalakīrti, whose insight even tops that of luminary Bodhisattvas such as Maitreya, was an inspiration to the Six Dynasties Buddhist lay nobility, and scenes from the Sūtra have inspired paintings, sculptures, poems and plays down to Mei Lanfang’s Tiannü sanhua 天女散花. While this Sūtra has been treated in scholarship as one of the earliest and most articulate presentations of “Mahāyāna” doctrine, the meaning of this concept itself has become controversial in recent discussion. Focusing on the commentaries of Kumārajīva, Seng Zhao and Zhu Daosheng (5th cent), the talk will explore their strategies of reading and explaining the Sūtra to a Chinese-reading audience; highlight the information they provide on northern Indian religious contexts; and detail the bandwidth of their notion of “Mahāyāna” in comparison to that offered by the Sūtra itself.

2015 Dec 07

December 7 - Cameron Warner

Date: 

Monday, December 7, 2015, 4:30pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

McFadden Room, Barker Center 24

Becoming Buddhist

Cameron Warner, Associate Professor of Anthropology, School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University

 

December 7, 4:30 pm

McFadden Room, Barker Center 24

(see map

 

Abstract: “Am I becoming a Buddhist?” “Are you a Buddhist?” These are questions many scholars of Buddhist studies have faced personally and professionally. They strike at the heart of ontological issues inherent to self-definition and self-cultivation for potential Buddhists. In this talk, I will explore these questions as they relate to contemporary Nepalis from two relatively new religious organizations, the Byoma Kusuma Sangha and the Namgyal Foundation. Based on nearly twelve months of fieldwork in Kathmandu between 2012-2014, I will explore what the daily practices, social organizations, and existential dilemmas of former Hindu converts, ethnic activists, and reform-minded lamas can tell us about why and how one becomes a Buddhist.

2016 Jan 25

January 25 - Jonathan Gold

Date: 

Monday, January 25, 2016, 4:30pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

Barker Center 316

Vasubandhu’s Relativism about the Buddha’s Causal Concepts

Jonathan Gold, Associate Professor of Religion, Princeton University

The great Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu (fourth/fifth century) critiqued his contemporaries for their profuse ontologies, which he felt they had developed out of a naively reificationist reading of Buddhist scripture. The present paper is a study of the section from Vasubandhu’s Commentary on the Treasury of Abhidharma (Abhidharmakośabhāṣya) in which he explains, and argues against, Vaibhāṣika realism about the four qualities of conditioned things: birth, stability, ageing and impermanence. Throughout this section, Vasubandhu argues against the conditioning factors while at the same time showing how it is often necessary to read the Buddha’s words as referring to unreal objects. These views entail one another, and together display, via Abhidharma analysis, an approach to Buddhist doctrine that is generally associated with the Mahāyāna. Vasubandhu’s Yogācāra interests are seen to hover in the background.

Monday, January 25, 4:30 pm

Barker Center 316

2016 Feb 01

February - Kim Gutschow

Date: 

Monday, February 1, 2016, 3:30pm to 5:00pm

Location: 

Sever Hall 202

The Buddha's Mother's Death: Past and Present

Kim Gutschow, Lecturer, Williams College; Professor, Institute of Ethnology; and 
Chair, Anthropology of Public Health, Center for Modern Indian Studies, Göttingen University

 

February 1, 3:30 pm

Sever Hall 202

 
2016 Feb 29

February - John Holt

Date: 

Monday, February 29, 2016, 4:30pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

Sever Hall 213

Narratives of Siege:  Buddhist/Muslim Conflict in Contemporary Myanmar

John Holt, Professor of the Humanities in Religion and Asian Studies, Bowdoin College 

February 29, 4:30 pm

Sever Hall 213

(see map

The severe violence that erupted in 2012 between Arakanese Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in the Rakhine state of western Myanmar has devolved into a national controversy in the ensuing political life of the country.  In this presentation I will profile perspectives of articulate and representative Rohingyas, Arakanese Buddhists and Bamar (Burmese) Buddhist in order to understand the triangulated nature of tensions existing between all three communities. 

2016 Mar 21

March 21 - Shea Ingram (NOTE: POSTPONED FROM MARCH 7)

Date: 

Monday, March 21, 2016, 4:30pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

Sever Hall 213

Social Networking in the East Asian Buddhist World in the Late 12th Century

Shea Ingram, Ph.D. Candidate, Harvard University

Social networks have always played a role in the development of religion.  By the Southern Song, large-scale networks centered around a particular monastery had emerged in China that attracted the participation of common people through Pure Land devotion.  A type of "two-tiered" Pure Land network, which included an "inner" tier of monastics and an "outer" tier of hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of lay disciples, served both to popularize Pure Land practice and encourage donations to the temple.  In contrast, until the late Heian Period in Japan, Pure Land societies were organizations limited to scholars, monks, and wandering hijiri, with few ties to common laypeople. This changed due to the efforts of the monk Chōgen (1121-1206), who traveled to China on three occasions between the early 1150's and 1176.  During his voyages, Chōgen witnessed the success of the institutionalized Pure Land network at Yanqingsi in Ningbo.  Based on his experiences there, he organized a similar, two-tiered network in Japan as part of a larger project to reconstruct Nara's Tōdaiji temple, which had been destroyed during the Gempei Civil War (1180-1185).  Chōgen deployed his network not only to raise revenues and procure raw materials, but also to popularize Pure Land devotion according to a continental model that would have lasting effects on medieval Japanese Buddhism and beyond.

2016 Apr 01

April - Jan Nattier

Date: 

Friday, April 1, 2016, 4:30pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

Location TBA

Note: This talk will be in April, but the exact date is not yet fixed.

Title TBA

Jan Nattier, Professor, International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University

 

Date and Location TBA