2015-2016 Lecture Series
2015-2016 Lecture Series Events
September 21 - Heather Blair
Date:
Location:
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 |
November 10 - Rudolf G. Wagner
Date:
Location:
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.
December 7 - Cameron Warner
Date:
Location:
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.
January 25 - Jonathan Gold
Date:
Location:
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 |
February - Kim Gutschow
Date:
Location:
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 |
February - John Holt
Date:
Location:
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.
March 21 - Shea Ingram (NOTE: POSTPONED FROM MARCH 7)
Date:
Location:
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.
April - Jan Nattier
Date:
Location:
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 |