Events
Past Events
Wednesday, November 18, 2009, 12:00 pm
Lewis Lancaster, Director, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initative (ECAI) and Professor Emeritus, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Buddhist Studies and Digital Technology: Computational Humanities
Brown Bag Lunch
3401 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
Lewis Lancaster, a specialist in the canons of Buddhist texts, earned his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies at the University of Wisconsin. He taught at UC-Berkeley for 33 years, with five years as Chair. With a grant from the National Geographic Society, he and a group of students and faculty inventoried texts in monasteries among the Sherpa people in the Himalayas. He then began to research the problems of converting Buddhist texts from Pali and Chinese into computer format, which resulted in major CD ROM databases. That computer experience then led him to form an association of scholars called the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), which is housed on the Berkeley campus and has a thousand affiliates worldwide. ECAI is promoting worldwide electronic access to quality research data by creating a partnership of technical specialists and the scholarly community dedicated to the support of scholarship through technology. Guided by the paradigm of the historical atlas, research data is indexed by time and place using temporally-enabled Geographic Information Systems software. User queries retrieve and display data in GIS layers on a map-based interface, allowing comparisons across discipline, region, and time.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Dr. Nareshman Bajracharya, Tribhuvan University
Public Construction of a Vajradhātu-maṇḍala, followed by a talk on the maṇḍala's principal characteristics and its ritual uses
(mandala construction starts at 10 AM; talk at 4 PM)
SSEAS Lounge, 342 Dwinelle Hall
Co-sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities
In a single isolated valley on the southern flank of the Himalayas, Indic Buddhism has survived to the present day. The historic Nepal Valley, known today as Kathmandu Valley, is the ancient home of the Newars. Some six hundred years after Buddhism disappeared from India, the Newars continue to preserve a form of "tantric" Vajrayāna Buddhism characteristic of the late phase of Buddhism in India. This highly ritualized form of Buddhism employs maṇḍalas, mantras and esoteric initiatory rites in pursuit of both liberation and worldly ends. The Vajradhātu-maṇḍala is the principle maṇḍala invoked in this tradition, used to consecrate and worship images, paintings, stūpas, monasteries, books, and other sacred objects.
Dr. Nareshman Bajracharya of Kathmandu is both an accomplished tantric ritual master with a large following in his community, and a well known academic, the founding director of the Department of Buddhist Studies at Tribhuvan University in Nepal.
Between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm Dr. Bajracharya will lay out a Vajradhātu-maṇḍala, following the Newar Buddhist tradition. Anyone interested is invited to come and observe the production of the maṇḍala and interact with Dr. Bajracharya. At 4:00 pm, having traced the maṇḍala, Dr. Bajracharya will give a brief presentation that will introduce the maṇḍala and its ritual uses in Newar Buddhism.
Thursday, November 12, 2009, 5:00 pm
Jan Nattier, Soka University
Re-evaluating the Translations of Zhu Fonian 竺佛念: A Preliminary Report
3335 Dwinelle Hall
Buddhist sutra carved into rock wall, Xiangtangshan caves (northern sector), Hebei Province, China. Northern Qi Dynasty (550-577).
Zhu Fonian (fl. 365-early 400s CE) is one of the best-known names in Chinese Buddhist translation history. Modern scholars generally think of him first in connection with the Dīrghāgama (長阿鋡經, T1) and the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya (四分律, T1428), both of which are listed in scriptural catalogues (both ancient and modern) as translated by Zhu Fonian together with the Kashmiri monk Buddhayaśas 佛陀耶舍. These two titles, however, are not singled out for attention in the oldest extant account of his life and works: the biography by Sengyou 僧祐 contained in the Chu sanzang jiji 出三藏記集 (completed c. 515 CE). Though these scriptures are registered under Zhu Fonian's name in the catalogue section of this work (which, as Antonello Palumbo has shown, is of a later vintage) in the biographical section Sengyou selects a quite different list of texts as representing Zhu Fonian's most important works. In this talk, Professor Nattier will begin by considering Zhu Fonian's life history as presented by Sengyou, paying special attention to what is said about the chronological sequence of his translations. She will then take a close look at at a text that is seldom mentioned in modern scholarship, but was considered by Sengyou to be one of Zhu Fonian's outstanding works: the Shizhu duan jie jing 十住斷結經 (T309), a scripture that presents an otherwise unknown account of the ten stages of the bodhisattva path. By doing so, we will be able to gain new insight into the way Zhu Fonian actually worked.
Jan Nattier did graduate work in the Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies at Indiana University (specializing in Classical Mongolian) before moving to Harvard University, where she completed her Ph.D. in Inner Asian and Altaic Studies in 1988. She has taught at Macalester College, the University of Hawaii, Stanford University, and Indiana University, and is currently Research Professor of Buddhist Studies at the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology (Soka University) in Tokyo, Japan. Her current area of specialization is the Chinese translations of Zhi Qian (early third century CE).
Thursday, October 29, 2009, 5:00 pm
Reiko Ohnuma, Dartmouth College
Mater Dolorosa: Māyā and Mahāprajāpatī in Grief
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Birth of the baby Buddha from the right side of his mother Māyā.
Gandhāran frieze, Kushan, 2nd c. C.E.
In the 13th century Latin hymn Stabat Mater, Mary, the mother of Christ, is celebrated and idealized as the "grieving mother" (mater dolorosa) who stands by the cross and weeps as her son is crucified. The believer, speaking through the words of the hymn, longs to experience Mary's grief for himself and thereby identify more closely with Christ's torment upon the cross. In the Indian Buddhist tradition, by contrast, the "grieving mother" is an iconic figure in an altogether different way: Mindless and hysterical out of grief over the death of her child, she stands as a paradigmatic example of the fact that all attachment leads to suffering. Spiritually stunted because of her grief and frequently likened to a pitiful animal, she is anything but an exemplary model for the Buddhist believer. She becomes exemplary, in fact, only when she is violently "de-mothered" — eradicating any particularistic attachment whatsoever to her own child, and universalizing her personal grief into a detached appreciation of the inevitability of death, impermanence, and suffering. Professor Ohnuma will focus on episodes in Buddhist literature in which the Buddha's own mothers — his biological mother Māyā and his foster-mother Mahāprajāpatī — are depicted in states of grief. It will contrast the way in which each mother deals with her grief, as well as placing this contrast within the context of a larger argument contrasting Māyā and Mahāprajāpatī as alternative representations of motherhood.
Reiko Ohnuma is an Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College. She was trained in South Asian Studies at U.C. Berkeley (B.A., 1986) and in Buddhist Studies at the University of Michigan (Ph.D. 1997). She specializes in the Buddhist traditions of South Asia, with a particular interest in Indian Buddhist narrative literature, hagiography, and the role and imagery of women. She is the author of Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood: Giving Away the Body in Indian Buddhist Literature (Columbia University Press, 2007), and is currently working on a second book, tentatively titled "Ties That Bind: Maternal Imagery and Discourse in Indian Buddhism."
Thursday, October 1, 2009, 5:00 pm
Andrew Rotman, Smith College
Saving the World through Commerce: Buddhism, Merchants, and Mercantilism in Early India
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
"For householders in this world, poverty is suffering . . . woeful in the world is poverty and debt."
-Aṅguttara-Nikāya iii 350, 352
In the early centuries of the Common Era, Buddhism had a very close and formative relationship with the merchant world, and this relationship transformed Buddhism in fundamental ways, leaving the market's imprint on the very foundations of Buddhism. One important byproduct of this relationship was a resultant market-based morality. Merit and virtue were now subjected to the forces of commodification, and as such could be bought, earned, stockpiled, transferred, cashed in, and depleted. I discuss this moral economy, and the market-based morality that underlies it, in my book Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian Buddhism. Yet, why use merchant activity as a model for spiritual activity? Did Buddhism embrace the market, or was Buddhism overrun by it? The aim of this paper is to begin to make sense of the history of this mercantilization process, focusing primarily on merchant-monastic relations in the Kusāṇa and Sātavāhana empires.
Andrew Rotman is Associate Professor of Religion at Smith College. His research largely concerns the ways in which seeing and what is seen in South Asia function as part of social history, affective relations, and material culture. This interest is apparent in his research on Indian Buddhism, South Asian media, and the economies of the north Indian bazaar. He recently published Divine Stories (2008), the first part of a two-part translation of the Divyāvadāna, one of the largest and most important collections of ancient Buddhist narratives. This volume inaugurates the Classics of Indian Buddhism series from Wisdom Publications. His second book, Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian Buddhism (2008), considers the construction of faith as a visual practice in Buddhism, and how seeing and faith function as part of overlapping visual and moral systems.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Group in Buddhist Studies Faculty and Student Labor Day Weekend Hike and Picnic
Mt. Tamalpais
Friday-Saturday, August 28-29, 2009, 9:00 am - 4:30 pm
"Zen Practice at 50" Symposium
Friday venue: San Francisco Zen Center, 300 Page St. (at Laguna St.), San Francisco
Saturday venue: Lipman Room, Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley
Co-sponsored by the San Francisco Zen Center
May 23, 2009 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi's arrival in America, an event that offers the opportunity for a broader look at Zen practice in America over the past fifty years, its current place in American life, and its vision for the future. "Zen Practice at 50" will bring together a mix of scholars and Zen teachers, including Hoitsu Suzuki, Norman Fischer, Edward Brown, Carl Bielefeldt, Grace Schireson, Robert Sharf, Richard Jaffe, and Wendy Adamek, who will create a forum for a lively exchange of ideas.
The first day, to be held at the San Francisco Zen Center, will begin with a brief biographical and historical presentation on Shunryu Suzuki, including the cultural context of his Japanese background and his choices regarding how to offer Zen practice to Americans. The day will continue with considerations of what was happening in the 1960s in San Francisco, what people perceived Suzuki offered, and what they received from him.
The second day, to be held on the UC Berkeley campus, will examine the current state of Zen practice in America. This will include consideration of what has been transmitted from Asia, what has changed, what has possibly been misunderstood, and how and what may have been lost in the transmission of Zen to America. Participants will also address the effect of Zen on American culture, the challenges facing Zen teachers and practitioners, the sustainability of Zen practice as a movement, and the most helpful and effective ways to offer and teach the dharma.
A complete schedule of this two-day event is available online at http://suzukiroshi.sfzc.org/symposium.
The symposium is free and open to the public on a first come, first served basis. You can pre-register for all or part of the event by email at events@sfzc.org.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009, 5:00 pm
Gregory Levine, UC Berkeley
Malraux's Buddha Heads: Fragments of the Past and the Sculptural "Gothic-Buddhist"
308J Doe Library, UC Berkeley
Monday, April 27, 2009, 3:00-6:00 pm
Thinking About Not Thinking: Buddhism, Film, and Meditation (Week 5)
Waking Life (Richard Linklater, U.S., 2001), 99 mins.
Part of a 5-week lecture and film series on alternate Mondays
Taught by Professor Robert Sharf, Chair of Buddhist Studies at UC-Berkeley
Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way (between College and Telegraph)
$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students
$9.50 Adults (18-64)
$6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 and over), disabled persons, and youth (17 and under)
This series will use film to explore some seminal and controversial issues in Buddhism and Buddhist meditation theory, and at the same time use Buddhist views of meditation and meditative experience to reflect on film. Thinking About Not Thinking will consider such topics as the Buddhist understanding of death, rebirth, and liberation; the ethical tension between ascetic withdrawal and compassionate engagement; the role of memory in Buddhist theories of consciousness; and contemporary debates (in both the academic and Buddhist communities) over the nature of meditation and mystical experiences.
Waking Life — a rollicking reflection on dreaming, altered states of consciousness, and death — is the first feature film to use the technology of "digital interpolated rotoscoping," which uses computers to facilitate hand-drawn animation over digitally-shot film. The result is an unusual blending of medium and message, in which neither the characters in the film nor the audience are quite sure where the contours of reality lie. Waking Life is an ideal film to end a series that ponders the relationship between meditative states, reality, and the film-makers' art.
Friday-Sunday, April 17-19, 2009
North American Graduate Student Conference in Buddhist Studies
370 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
For more information, please contact Buddhist_conference@berkeley.edu, or go to the conference website at ieas.berkeley.edu/gradconference2009.
Monday, April 6, 2009, 3:00-6:00 pm
Thinking About Not Thinking: Buddhism, Film, and Meditation (Week 4)
Memento (Christopher Nolan, U.S., 2000), 113 mins.
Part of a 5-week lecture and film series on alternate Mondays
Taught by Professor Robert Sharf, Chair of Buddhist Studies at UC-Berkeley
Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way (between College and Telegraph)
$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students
$9.50 Adults (18-64)
$6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 and over), disabled persons, and youth (17 and under)
This series will use film to explore some seminal and controversial issues in Buddhism and Buddhist meditation theory, and at the same time use Buddhist views of meditation and meditative experience to reflect on film. Thinking About Not Thinking will consider such topics as the Buddhist understanding of death, rebirth, and liberation; the ethical tension between ascetic withdrawal and compassionate engagement; the role of memory in Buddhist theories of consciousness; and contemporary debates (in both the academic and Buddhist communities) over the nature of meditation and mystical experiences.
What is the place of memory in Buddhist thought and practice? Does "living in the moment" require letting go of the past, or coming to terms with it? Memento, a film about someone who has lost the ability to form short-term memories, will be used to ponder the often conflicting Buddhist theories about the role of memory in experience, consciousness, and meditation.
Thursday, April 2, 2009, 5:00 pm
Sarah Jacoby, Columbia University
Love Revelations in the Autobiography of a Tibetan Ḍākinī
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
The first Padmanabh S. Jaini Graduate Student Award in Buddhist Studies will be presented at this event.
Statue of Sera Khandro (1892-1940) housed in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Romantic love as we think of it today is a product of a particular set of socio-historical influences exclusive to European-American cultures, or so many scholars contend. The Tibetan Buddhist context would seem to prove this point as love between a man and a woman is more often associated with the Buddhist nemeses of attachment, desire, and craving than with the path to enlightenment. Despite the ubiquity of iconographic and literary depictions of male-female (yab yum) deities, sexual union in Tibetan Buddhism is usually understood less as a sacralization of the love act than it is as a means to the end of spiritual realization. That said, the rare autobiography of the Tibetan visionary Sera Khandro (1892-1940) and the biography she wrote of her root teacher and partner Drimé Özer (1881-1924) offer a different perspective on consort practices far more akin to "Western" notions of love than her Tibetan Buddhist context would seemingly allow. In this talk, I suggest that as one of the few Tibetan women to have written her autobiography or to have her writings become accepted as authentic Buddhist revelation, Sera Khandro drew on the Tantric paradigm of wholeness as the union of male method and female wisdom to write herself into the male dominated religious hierarchy of her early twentieth-century Eastern Tibetan world. Her representations of her relationship with Drimé Özer not only mirror this Tantric paradigm, but articulate a sentimental love between the two of them that shares a great deal with Euro-American notions of romantic love.
Sarah Jacoby is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. She received her PhD in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies from the University of Virginia. Her interests include Nyingma Studies, Buddhist revelation, gender studies, autobiography, Eastern Tibetan area studies, and Buddhism in contemporary Tibet. She is the author of "Revelation and Community in Early Twentieth-century Golok Religious Encampments (sgar)," forthcoming in the Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies. Additionally, she is the author of "To be or not to be Celibate: Morality and Consort Practices According to the Treasure Revealer Sera Khandro's (1892-1940) Auto/biographical Writings," in a book she co-edited along with Antonio Terrone titled Buddhism Beyond the Monastery: Tantric Practices and their Performers in Tibet and the Himalayas (forthcoming, Brill). She is currently working on two book manuscripts, the first a study of Sera Khandro's autobiography titled Love Revelations: The Autobiography of a Tibetan Buddhist Ḍākinī and the second an annotated translation of Sera Khandro's autobiography. In the fall of 2009 she will begin teaching at Northwestern University where she will be Assistant Professor of South Asian Religions.
Monday, March 30, 2009, 3:00-6:00 pm
Thinking About Not Thinking: Buddhism, Film, and Meditation (Week 3)
Fearless (Peter Weir, U.S., 1993), 121 mins.
Part of a 5-week lecture and film series on alternate Mondays
Taught by Professor Robert Sharf, Chair of Buddhist Studies at UC-Berkeley
Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way (between College and Telegraph)
$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students
$9.50 Adults (18-64)
$6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 and over), disabled persons, and youth (17 and under)
This series will use film to explore some seminal and controversial issues in Buddhism and Buddhist meditation theory, and at the same time use Buddhist views of meditation and meditative experience to reflect on film. Thinking About Not Thinking will consider such topics as the Buddhist understanding of death, rebirth, and liberation; the ethical tension between ascetic withdrawal and compassionate engagement; the role of memory in Buddhist theories of consciousness; and contemporary debates (in both the academic and Buddhist communities) over the nature of meditation and mystical experiences.
Some see the heart of Buddhist meditation as the practice of mindfulness or "bare attention" — a stepping "forward" into the present moment. But there is also a sense in which Buddhist practice is a step "back" — one withdraws from the world so as to let go of everything, including the fear of one's own death. Can one be utterly fearless and still care deeply about the things of this world? Peter Weir's Fearless is a powerful vehicle for exploring the conundrums involved in bringing traditional Buddhist practices — practices originally intended for celibate renunciates who had left their families — into the modern world.
Monday, March 16, 2009, 3:00-6:00 pm
Thinking About Not Thinking: Buddhism, Film, and Meditation (Week 2)
I Heart Huckabees (David O. Russell, U.S., 2004), 107 mins.
Part of a 5-week lecture and film series on alternate Mondays
Taught by Professor Robert Sharf, Chair of Buddhist Studies at UC-Berkeley
Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way (between College and Telegraph)
$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students
$9.50 Adults (18-64)
$6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 and over), disabled persons, and youth (17 and under)
This series will use film to explore some seminal and controversial issues in Buddhism and Buddhist meditation theory, and at the same time use Buddhist views of meditation and meditative experience to reflect on film. Thinking About Not Thinking will consider such topics as the Buddhist understanding of death, rebirth, and liberation; the ethical tension between ascetic withdrawal and compassionate engagement; the role of memory in Buddhist theories of consciousness; and contemporary debates (in both the academic and Buddhist communities) over the nature of meditation and mystical experiences.
Buddhism teaches that everything we hold to be true, everything we hold most dear, is in some sense an "empty" conceptual construct, and that the solution to human suffering is to recognize the ephemerality of the world around us. Yet Buddhism also emphasizes compassion; although a saint or bodhisattva recognizes that suffering itself is an illusion, he/she must still act to alleviate that suffering. Russell's "existential comedy" plays out the struggle between emptiness and compassion, withdrawal and engagement, alienation and interconnectedness.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009, 5:00 pm
Mark Tuschman, Photographer
John Johnston, Curator of Asian Art, San Antonio Museum of Art
Jake Dalton, Assistant Professor of Tibetan Buddhism, UC Berkeley
Colloquium on Bhutanese culture and Buddhism
IEAS conference room, 2223 Fulton St., 6th floor
The three speakers participating in this colloquium will provide cultural, religious, and historical context for the exhibit of images of Bhutan by Bay Area photographer Mark Tuschman that is on display in the IEAS gallery February 19-April 15, 2009.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009, 12:05 pm
Sheng Jiang, Shandong University
Making Room for the Dao, Getting Rid of the Buddha: The Case of Qianfo Dong
3401 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
Brown-bag lunch lecture
Cosponsored by the Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, and Center for South Asia Studies
In a remote dangerous mountain in Shandong Province, China, there is a former Buddhist cave that Daoists renamed Qianzhen dong (Cavern of a Thousand Perfected). This cave contains nearly a thousand Buddhist images on its walls. During our ethnographic fieldwork on Shandong Daoism, which included the collection of previously undiscovered stele inscriptions, we found that the character zhen ("Perfected") had been superimposed over the character fo ("Buddha"). Thus, at some point, Daoists had taken control of this "Buddhist" sacred site. In close proximity to Qianzhen dong, we found another cave called Qianfo dong (Cavern for Relocated Buddhas). It contains very simple Buddhist rock carvings that were executed or commissioned by local believers of Quanzhen Daoism.
Sheng Jiang will discuss the process by which this geographical transformation occurred as well as its principal agents. He will also offer critical reflections on the inter-religious history of the place as well as the significance of this place for understanding Chinese religiosity during the early Qing dynasty, especially the local and regional situation of Shandong Daoism. This research challenges the common assumption that Buddhism was the primary tradition of privilege during the early Qing. It also provides an interesting window into doctrinal and ritualistic concerns of Daoists as they came to occupy and reconstruct sites previously inhabited by Buddhists. Interestingly, the Daoists in question expressed a reverence for Buddhist images and sacred objects that is noteworthy for its sense of spiritual power contained therein. Sheng Jiang's preliminary research indicates that these Daoists created innovative ways to relocate the Buddhas in order to make room for the Dao.
Monday, March 2, 2009, 3:00-6:00 pm
Thinking About Not Thinking: Buddhism, Film, and Meditation (Week 1)
After Life (Hirokazu Kore-eda,Japan, 1999), 115 mins.
Part of a 5-week lecture and film series on alternate Mondays
Taught by Professor Robert Sharf, Chair of Buddhist Studies at UC-Berkeley
Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way (between College and Telegraph)
$5.50 BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students
$9.50 Adults (18-64)
$6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, senior citizens (65 and over), disabled persons, and youth (17 and under)
This series will use film to explore some seminal and controversial issues in Buddhism and Buddhist meditation theory, and at the same time use Buddhist views of meditation and meditative experience to reflect on film. Thinking About Not Thinking will consider such topics as the Buddhist understanding of death, rebirth, and liberation; the ethical tension between ascetic withdrawal and compassionate engagement; the role of memory in Buddhist theories of consciousness; and contemporary debates (in both the academic and Buddhist communities) over the nature of meditation and mystical experiences.
In the film After Life three salient but incommensurable Buddhist death experiences are interwoven. In the first, one's state of mind at the moment of death irrevocably determines one's next rebirth; in another, at death one enters an interregnum — a bardo or purgatory — during which it is possible to influence the conditions of one's next rebirth; in the last, for Buddhas and enlightened beings only, death brings an eternal end to rebirth. However construed, Buddhists did agree that meditative practice was preparation for the inevitable confrontation with death. Kore-eda's After Life, which imaginatively draws on and moves beyond traditional Buddhist cosmology, will be used to explore central notions of death, rebirth, karma, and liberation.
Thursday, February 26, 2009, 5:00 pm
Mark Rowe, McMaster University
Biographies of Non-Eminent Monks: Situating Contemporary Japanese Buddhist Priests
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Nichiren priests on their way to perform a memorial service in rural Nigata
Despite the fact that there are currently over 300,000 officially certified Buddhist priests in Japan, there has hardly been any significant scholarly research into their lives and training. What are their backgrounds? How are they trained? What are their day-to-day activities? How do they mediate between the doctrinal ideals of their particular traditions and the real-world needs of parishioners? What do priests think of the larger organizations (sects) to which they belong? As a way to open up some of these issues, this presentation will explore varying ideas of "propagation" within several Japanese Buddhist sects. Time permitting, there will also be an audience participation component to the talk.
Mark Rowe is an Assistant Professor of Japanese Religions at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He received an M.A. from Kyoto University and his Ph.D. from Princeton. He is an ethnographer of Japanese Buddhism specializing in the current realities of Japanese temple priests. In 2004 he co-edited (with Stephen Covell) a special issue of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies focusing on contemporary Japanese Buddhism. He is currently completing a book manuscript titled "Death By Association: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism," which traces the institutional realities of the "traditional" Buddhist sects through an exploration of Buddhist responses to radical shifts in contemporary burial practices.
February 19 - April 15, 2009
Portraits of Buddhist Bhutan
An exhibit of photographer Mark Tuschman's images of Bhutan
IEAS gallery, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Buddhism is the state religion of Bhutan, and its institutions play a central role in society. Its monasteries are centers of continuing training. Buddhist ceremonial dances, choreographed over the centuries by religious leaders, serve not only spiritual functions but offer merit to all who observe. The visual arts, however beautiful, exist as expressions and enactments of Buddhist world-view, and as revelations of meaning for the initiate.
Photo by Mark Tuschman
Known as the "Land of the Thunder Dragon," Bhutan has guarded its borders against much of twentieth-century development. With the acceptance by its king of a constitution in 2008, Bhutan may emerge as Asia's newest democracy. However, access to the country remains strictly controlled, and its traditional Buddhist culture as yet yields little to modernity.
American photographer Mark Tuschman seeks "to photograph people with compassion and dignity in the hope of communicating our interrelatedness." His images capture structures, rituals, arts, and individuals — young and old alike — that suggest the range of visual imagery associated with Buddhism in Bhutan.
This exhibit has been arranged as a complement to the exhibition The Dragon's Gift: The Sacred Arts of Bhutan at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.
Thursday, February 12, 2009, 5:00 pm
Toru Funayama, Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
Calling Oneself a Saint: Religious Awareness in Medieval Chinese Buddhism
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Buddhist saint, from cave 285 at Dunhuang.
We find some cases of self-designation of saintliness, i.e. saying "I am a saint of such-and-such a stage," in Medieval Chinese Buddhist texts. Some of those practitioners were truly regarded as saints by their contemporaries and revered as such; others were just frauds. In this talk Professor Funayama will introduce several interesting examples of this phenomenon and discuss some of the problems underlying self-designation in Buddhism. He will also take up such related problems as the connection with the monastic code of conduct (vinaya) and an example of cultic massacre.
Toru Funayama, born in 1961, is currently Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies at the Institute for Research in Humanities at Kyoto University in Japan. His research mainly covers two different areas in the history of Buddhism. One is Chinese Buddhism in the Six Dynasties period, especially in the 5th and 6th centuries (in particular, the formation of Chinese Buddhist translation and apocrypha and the spread of the notion of Mahayana precepts). His second specialty concerns philological and philosophical issues in Buddhist epistemology and logic in India from the 5th-10th centuries, particularly Kamalaśīla's (ca. 740-795) theory of perception. In both areas, he is interested in the concept of saints and saintliness in Buddhism, and the historical formation of Buddhist commentarial literature in India and China.
Thursday, January 29, 2009, 5:00 pm
Giulio Agostini, Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley
Buddhist dreams, Erotic Dreams, and Herophilus of Chalcedon
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Queen Māyā's White Elephant Dream and the Conception of the Buddha Provenance: Gandhāra
Location: Zenyōmitsu-ji, a Buddhist Temple in Tokyo, Japan. Date: 2nd/3rd century AD.
For a Buddhist cleric, a seminal emission is a fault, unless it occurs in a dream. The traditional definition of karma as passionate intention entails that dream actions are real and produce retribution, because intention and passions are present even while dreaming. Thus believed the Theravādins, the Vaibhāsikas, and the Mūlasarvāstivādins. And yet, dreams are instead unreal according to the Uttarapāthakas, the Dārsṭāntikas, Harivarman, the Yogācārabhumi, and arguably the Mahāsāṁghikas. In these disagreements, one must also see different reactions to Mahādeva's thesis on the possibility of nocturnal emissions for liberated beings. Related to the dream exception are the various Buddhist classifications of dreams. In most of them, a separate category for dreams caused by desire and for wet dreams is conspicuously missing. Noteworthy are those classifications mentioning dreams caused by humor disequilibrium and prophetic dreams not sent by the gods. The latter category is problematic because it includes heterogeneous elements: in the Theravāda commentaries, its prophetic character is explained in terms of the theory of karma, as a result of past actions; in the Milindapañha, instead, it is explained in terms of a theory of dream perception of external subtle images; according to a Chinese Theravāda commentary, to this category also belong dreams caused by desire, in which karma is produced. Quite surprisingly, this heterogeneity may be understood in the light of the Greek physician Herophilus' threefold classification, mentioning dreams caused by humor disequilibrium, dreams sent by the gods, and dreams caused by external subtle images. In the last category, Herophilus includes two Buddhist apparently heterogeneous elements: explicitly, dreams caused by desire and wet dreams; implicitly, referring to Democritus' theory of eidola, prophetic dreams not sent by the gods. Other details confirm the hypothesis of Herophilus' influence on the Buddhist classification, especially evident in the Milindapañha.
After completing a laurea in Classics and Sanskrit from the University of Milan, Giulio Agostini earned a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. His thesis focused on doctrinal debates about the definition of 'lay Buddhist' in ancient India. He has published on ethics and legal issues, such as the admissibility of abortion and of taking 'partial' lay vows, and on the history of exegetical disagreements between competing Buddhist traditions. Dr. Agostini will be a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley during Spring 2009.
Thursday, January 22, 2009, 5:00 pm
Imre Hamar, Fulbright Scholar, Department of Religious Studies, University of Virginia
Commentary-writing in Chinese Buddhism
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
A monk copying the Avatamsaka-sutra at Qiongzhu monastery in Kunming, Yunnan province
In several major cultures of the world, commentaries make up a considerable proportion of the full body of written texts. Holy scriptures are often hazy and ambiguous, or even completely incomprehensible, without additional explanations. To understand them in the right way is, therefore, both an important task and a serious challenge for the literati of all times. In Chinese Buddhist literature, the significance of commentaries is well illustrated by the fact that in the Taishō edition they make up eleven and a half volumes, as opposed to the four and a half volumes of essays expounding the teachings of schools. The formal and essential criteria of commentary-writing formulated gradually, with commentary as a genre attaining its final form by Tang times. This is the form that became the model to be followed by later generations. In this lecture, Professor Hamar will show the process of how commentary-writing developed from the early period and discuss the main features of the full-fledged commentary.
Imre Hamar received his Ph.D. from the Hungarian Academy of Science in 1997 and earned his habilitation in 2004 with the completion of his study titled "Manifestation of Buddha." He has published many books and articles in Hungarian and English, most recently "A Religious Leader in the Tang: Chengguan's Biography" (2002) and "A kínai buddhizmus története" (History of Chinese Buddhism) (2004). In addition to his appointment as Professor of Chinese Studies at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, Dr. Hamar is also the director of ELTE's Institute of East Asian Studies. He is a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Virginia for the 2008-09 academic year.
Golden crown from Tillya-tepe (1st century CE), Musée Guimet
Photo: Thierry Ollivier
"Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul" exhibit
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, October 24, 2008 to January 25, 2009.
Friday-Saturday, November 14-15, 2008
Recovering Afghanistan's Past: Cultural Heritage in Context
Chevron Auditorium, International House
2299 Piedmont Ave., Berkeley
Cosponsored by the Al-Falah Program for Islamic Studies (CMES),
Townsend Center for the Humanities,
Center for South Asia Studies (CSAS),
Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES),
History of Art Department,
Society for Asian Art,
Association for the Protection of Afghan Archaeology (APAA),
California State University-East Bay,
Consulate General of France,
International House, and
Willis Deming on behalf of the Society for Art & Cultural Heritage of India (SACHI)
The "Recovering Afghanistan's Past: Cultural Heritage in Context" conference will focus on Afghanistan's cultural heritage in its past and present contexts and bring together scholars from various disciplines to address, among others, the following issues:
- The recovered objects from the National Museum
- Recent research and preservation/renovation projects
- Challenges of cultural heritage protection
- The complexities of 'targeted' heritage
- Cultural heritage and identity
This conference is organized in conjunction with the "Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul" exhibit which will be on display at several venues in the United States in 2008-2009, including the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, October 24, 2008 - January 25, 2009. This exhibit highlights the objects thought to have been looted from the National Museum of Afghanistan, but later rediscovered in the vault of the Presidential Palace. The exhibit centers on three major collections — Ai Khanum, Tillya-tepe, and Begram — which represent important archeological discoveries that have informed our understanding of the development of ancient Afghan cultures.
For more information, please go to the conference website at http:// ieas.berkeley.edu/ afghanconference2008.
Thursday, November 6, 2008, 5:00 pm
2008-09 Numata Lecture
James Robson, Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhist Studies
Searching For a Better Return: "Preparatory Cultivation" [nixiu 逆修, yuxiu 預修] and the Economy of Salvation in East Asian Buddhism
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Picture of Amitabha embroidered with the hair of the individual performing a rite of "preparatory cultivation." Owned by the Hôkoku-ji in Nagoya. Kamakura Period.
It is commonly understood that Buddhist death rituals, which transfer merit from the living to deceased ancestors, exemplify the importance of filial piety in East Asia. In this talk Prof. Robson discusses a variety of Chinese and Japanese sources that suggest that some people were in fact uneasy about placing their post-mortem fate in the hands of surviving relatives. His talk will explore the development of a ritual of "preparatory cultivation," which involves accruing merit for oneself while alive that is transferred to oneself after death. These pre-mortem rites were propagated by Buddhist institutions and became a widespread phenomena in East Asia. How does an understanding of the development of these practices force us to rethink commonly held notions about East Asian conceptions of death and the afterlife?
James Robson is an Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He specializes in the history of Medieval Chinese Buddhism and Daoism and is particularly interested in issues of sacred geography, local religious history, talismans, and the historical development of Chan/Zen Buddhism. He is the author of "Buddhism and the Chinese Marchmount System [Wuyue]: A Case Study of the Southern Marchmount (Mt. Nanyue)" in John Lagerwey, ed. Religion and Chinese Society: Ancient and Medieval China (Hong Kong: The Chinese UP and École Française d'Extrême-Orient, 2004) and "A Tang Dynasty Chan Mummy [roushen] and a Modern Case of Furta Sacra? Investigating the Contested Bones of Shitou Xiqian," in Bernard Faure, ed. Chan Buddhism in Ritual Context (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003). He is presently completing a book manuscript entitled Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak [Nanyue 南嶽] in Medieval China (forthcoming, Harvard Asia Center). He has also been engaged in a long-term collaborative research project with the École Française d'Extrême-Orient studying local religious statuary from Hunan province and what they can tell us about the local religious history of that region.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008, 5:00 pm
Inaugural Khyentse Foundation Lecture in Tibetan Buddhism
Jacob Dalton, Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley
Rethinking Tibet's Dark Age: Demons, Tantras, and the Formation of Tibetan Buddhism
Heyns Room, The Faculty Club, UC-Berkeley
Nubchen Sangye Yeshe (mid 9th-10th c.), a tantric master said to have protected Buddhism against the demonic forces of Tibet's dark age.
With the collapse of the Yarlung empire around 842 C.E., Tibet descended into its so-called "dark age." As for Europe's own dark ages, few documents survived the period, and what little we do know is usually filtered through traditional historical narratives that portray the age as one of religious corruption and decay. In this talk, Dalton will suggest that such traditional accounts have obscured the more positive aspects of the period. Freed from the watchful eyes of the imperial court and the monastic orthodoxy, Tibetans of the late ninth and tenth centuries were able to make Buddhism their own. The themes, the imagery, and the strategies they developed during these inchoate years formed the cultural foundations upon which Tibetan Buddhism would be built. Only by excavating these foundations and shedding some light on this "dark age" can we gain a clear appreciation of the Tibetan adaptation of Buddhism.
Jacob Dalton received his M.A. and Ph.D. (Buddhist Studies) from the University of Michigan. After working for three years (2002-05) as a researcher with the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library, he taught at Yale University (2005-2008) before moving to Berkeley. He works on Nyingma religious history, tantric ritual, paleography, and the Dunhuang manuscripts. He is the author of a forthcoming study on violence and the formation of Tibetan Buddhism, and co-author of Tibetan Tantric Manuscripts from Dunhuang: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Stein Collection at the British Library (Brill, 2006). He is currently working on a history of Tibetan Buddhism, as seen through the eyes of the "Sutra Empowerment" (Mdo dbang) tradition of the Nyingma school. Future plans include a study of tantric ritual in the Dunhuang manuscripts.
Thursday, September 11, 2008, 5:00 pm
Frances Garrett, University of Toronto
Considering Anthropophagy in Tibet
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
This presentation will examine "cannibalism" as a locus of connection between religious, medical and occult traditions in Tibet. Surveying examples of the consumption of human body parts as articulated in Tibetan contemplative, ritual, occult and medical literature, and in myth, iconography and narrative, this talk will consider how anthropophagy has been controversial not only for Buddhologists and European visitors to Tibet, but also for Tibetans themselves. Professor Garrett draws in particular from the Nectar Tantras canon and its writings on the contemplative and ritual practice called Accomplishing Medicine (sman sgrub), an esoteric exercise that involves the creation and use of "nectar" recipes using human products. She concludes that in Tibet anthropophagous practices and narratives are acts of transgression, generosity, and incorporation that are simultaneously savage and civilized.
Frances Garrett is Assistant Professor of Tibetan Buddhism in the Department for the Study of Religion. She received her PhD from the University of Virginia in 2004. She is intrigued by how Buddhist voices command a growing literary, ideological, social and political presence in the formative twelfth-fifteenth centuries in Tibet. A history of ideas that weaves across sectarian and disciplinary boundaries, her book, Religion, Medicine and the Human Embryo in Tibet (Routledge, 2008) links aspects of Tibetan medicine to expressions of culture, religion, art and literature through a study of embryology in Tibetan literature. Current projects consider the intersections between tantric practice, ritual and occult knowledge, and medical theory, and what these tell us about the processes of institutional and ideological change in "renaissance" Tibet.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008, 4:00 pm
Patricia Graham
Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600-2005
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Cosponsored by the Institute of East Asian Studies and the Center for Japanese Studies
Introduced by Gregory Levine, History of Art, UC Berkeley.
This talk explores the reasons for the enduring popularity in the Japanese Buddhist pantheon of Buddhist "saints" — monks known as Rakan (Luohan in Chinese; and Arhat in Sanskrit) and laity known as the Buddha's 10 Great Disciples (Shaka Judai deshi). Both groups were devout, unconventional personages who gained enlightenment after hearing the teachings of the Buddha in India. Their popularity as personal saviors continues to the present and has inspired the creation of numerous idiosyncratic images by artists working within and apart from formal Buddhist organizations. Their widespread appeal is emblematic of their transcendence beyond Buddhism to universal symbols of individualism and integrity.
Patricia J. Graham, a former professor of Japanese art and culture, and museum curator, is an independent scholar and Asian art consultant based in Lawrence, Kansas. This talk is drawn from her new book, Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600-2005 (University of Hawai'i Press, 2007).
Friday, April 25, 2008, 12:00-2:00 pm
CBS Silk Road Initiative Lecture and Workshop
Jason Neelis, University of Florida
Enigma of an Absence: Buddhist Archaeology, Art and Inscriptions in the Transit Zones of Xinjiang and Northern Pakistan
3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
Petroglyph of figures venerating a stūpa with offerings along with a Kharosṭhī inscription ("By Puśia, resident of Oṇi") from the 1st-2nd century C.E. on the upper Indus River in northern Pakistan at Chilas II
A network of passageways through the upper Indus region of northern Pakistan directly connected the Northern Route (uttarāpatha) of South Asia with branches of the so-called Silk Routes in the southern Tarim Basin of Xinjiang. These capillary routes were instrumental in the cross-cultural transmission of Buddhism as well as commercial exchanges, migrations, diplomatic contacts, and military expeditions throughout the first millennium CE. However, the dearth of archaeological remains of Buddhist monasteries in Xinjiang before ca. 250 CE and in the upper Indus before the visit of Faxian shortly after 400 CE is enigmatic. The late appearance of residential monasteries in the intermediate regions between Buddhist centers in the northwestern Indian subcontinent, western Central Asia, and China poses challenges to the standard model of point-to-point diffusion from South Asia to western Central Asia and along the silk routes of eastern Central Asia to East Asia. In "Buddhism Across Boundaries: The Foreign Input" Erik Zürcher rejects the model of "contact expansion" as an insufficient explanation for the early phases of the establishment of Buddhism in China by drawing attention to the fact that the first Iranian and western Central Asian foreign monks and translators belonged to a Buddhist community in Loyang about a century before Buddhist monasteries appear in the Tarim Basin. Zürcher develops an alternative model of "long-distance transmission" to account for hybrid forms of Later Han period Chinese Buddhism, which resulted from irregular contact with Buddhist cultures in western Central Asia and South Asia because the transit zone of Xinjiang did not have sufficient economic surpluses to support residential communities of monks and nuns until later periods. This presentation will reassess the model of long-distance transmission and its application to Xinjiang and the Northern Areas of Pakistan by examining early Buddhist archaeology, art (including rock drawings), graffiti inscriptions, and other written documents. An attempt will be made to extend this model for the transmission of Buddhism to other areas of the Buddhist world.
Jason Neelis received his Ph.D. in Asian Languages and Literature from the University of Washington with a dissertation on long-distance trade and transmission of Buddhism through Northern Pakistan. He is an Assistant Professor for South Asian Buddhism in the Department of Religion at the University of Florida. While specializing in the study of early Buddhist inscriptions and manuscripts, he seeks to understand patterns in the cross-cultural transmission of Buddhism between South Asia and Central Asia. Recent publications include "La Vieille Route Reconsidered: Alternative Paths for Early Transmission of Buddhism Beyond the Borderlands of South Asia" in the Bulletin of the Asia Institute and "Passages to India: Śaka and Kuṣāṇa Migrations in Historical Contexts" in On the Cusp of an Era: Art in the Pre-Kuṣāṇa World.
Thursday, April 24, 2008, 5:00 pm
Ingrid Jordt, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Politics, Anti-Politics & the 2007 Monks' Protest in Burma
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Co-sponsored by the Center for Southeast Asia Studies
"Turning over the alms bowl" is a form of non-violent Buddhist protest with deep historical roots in Burma. This talk will discuss the religious boycott as a soft power movement that negotiates the careful divide between religious moral sanction and outright political action.
Ingrid Jordt is a special authority on Burmese Buddhism having spent several years in Burma as an ordained nun in the 1980s. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University where she studied with Prof. Stanley Tambiah, and has emerged as a leading expert in recent months in providing context on the popular protests that emerged in Burma in late 2007. Her most recent book is Burma's Mass Lay Meditation Movement: Buddhism and the Cultural Construction of Power (Ohio, 2007).
Tuesday, April 22, 2008, 5:00 pm
Marcus Bingenheimer, Dharma Drum Buddhist College, Taiwan
Buddhism and Technology - Attitudes, Philosophy, and Practices
3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
Co-sponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies
Information technology slowly changes the ways of research and teaching in the Humanities. As new forms of scholarly publication and evaluation emerge, scholars in the Humanities are challenged to rethink the role of technology for their field. Taking cues from the philosophy of technology in the Western tradition, especially that of Martin Heidegger, this talk will probe the possibilities of a dialog between Buddhism and technology. The presentation will make the case for a critical and reflective attitude towards the use of technology and the chance for Buddhist Studies as academic discipline to play a mediating role in the emerging dialog.
Marcus Bingenheimer's research interest lies mainly in the history of Buddhism and Buddhist historiography. Beyond that he is engaged in the task of editing and supervising the production of digital Buddhist texts and Buddhist study tools. Dr. Bingenheimer has published on Japanese and Chinese monks of the 7th and 8th century, the Chinese Buddhist historiographer Yinshun (1906-2005) and contemporary Buddhist whole-body relics in Taiwan. He has contributed an entry to the DDB on Yinshun.
Saturday, April 19, 2008, 9:00 am - 4:00 pm
Symposium on Literati Buddhism in Middle-Period China
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Co-sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies
Institute of East Asian Studies
Townsend Center for the Humanities
This conference seeks to examine the intersection between elite culture and Buddhism in the Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties. This relationship has several dimensions: literati who pursued Buddhism as a complement or alternative to state-sanctioned studies; engagement with "Confucian" learning by Buddhist monks; the role of Buddhist sites in literary and artistic imaginations; the use of poetry and calligraphy by Buddhist monks; the role of Buddhist monasteries, temples, and cloisters in local society; and the material instantiations of the relations between monks and the literati.
Detailed conference information is available at http://ieas.berkeley.edu/events/literati.
Thursday, April 17, 2008, 5:00 pm
Ryûichi Abé, Harvard University
Origin of the Shingon Patriarchal Portraiture — Or, Disjunction between History and Theory
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Co-sponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies
This talk examines, first, the social and historical condition in which Kûkai produced the portraits of Nâgârjuna and Nâgabodhi in the twelfth year of the Kônin era (821), and, secondly, the validity of the theory of Shingon's Dharma transmission, the nondual transmission of the Matrix and Diamond Mandalas, which is said to be grounded in these paintings and Kûkai's narratives attached to each of these works. Although a few art historians have studied these portraits, there is not yet a thorough investigation on Kûkai's motive to commission the production of these paintings at this particular stage in his career. Professor Abé will focus his analysis in the relationship, on one hand, between these two portraits produced under Kûkai's supervision and the five patriarchal portraits Kûkai brought back from China, and, on the other, between the biographical narrative texts Kûkai prepared to be attached to the seven portraits. The concluding part of the talk considers Kûkai's production of the portraiture in relationship to his swiftly increasing visibility and public responsibility in the early Heian priestly and aristocratic circles.
Ryûichi Abé is the Reischauer Institute Professor of Japanese Religions at Harvard University. Until May 2005, he was Professor of Japanese religions and Buddhism of East Asia at Columbia University, where he received the Philip and Ruth Hettleman Award for distinguished teaching. Professor Abé, through his teaching and books, has made an important contribution to the Western understanding of Japanese Buddhism. His book on Kûkai underscores Kûkai's impact on 9th century Japanese society. At a time when Confucian discourse dominated Japan, Kûkai developed a "voice" for Buddhism. He has also written about Ryōkan, and Saichō. His publications include The Weaving of Mantra : Kûkai and the Construction of Esoteric Buddhist Discourse (1999), Great Fool: Zen Master Ryōkan: Poems, Letters, and Other Writings (1996, with Peter Haskel), and Saichō and Kûkai: A Conflict of Interpretations (1995).
Thursday, April 3, 2008, 5:00 pm
Birgit Kellner, Visiting Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley
Are External Objects Spiritually Harmful or Philosophically Impossible?: Some Remarks on the Criticism of External Reality in South Asian Buddhist Thought
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Various Buddhist thinkers have criticized the notion that our cognitions are of external objects, or that external, material entities which we can cognize actually exist. This talk will discuss several varieties of this criticism that were articulated in the latter half of the first millennium CE in South Asia. In doing so, I am going to especially pursue two aspects: first, the philosophical characteristics of the various arguments that are advanced, and second, the interplay of philosophical argumentation, which looks at whether the existence of external objects is rationally defensible, with soteriological attitudes that might instead focus on whether believing in external reality is spiritually harmful.
Brigit Kellner specializes in the history of Buddhist logic and epistemology in ancient India and Tibet. After completing her M.A. studies under the supervision of Ernst Steinkellner at the University of Vienna (Austria) in 1994, she went to Japan, where a dissertation on the knowledge of absence in Buddhist epistemological thought in India after Dharmakirti, supervised by Shoryu Katsura, earned her a PhD from the University of Hiroshima in 1999. Supported by further research fellowships from the Austrian Science Fund and the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation (Germany), she carried out further research on the relationship between realist and idealist epistemologies in Buddhist thought, which is also going to be the topic of her Habilitation monograph that is currently being completed. In addition to her work on the history of Buddhist philosophy, Birgit Kellner developed and implemented several academic database projects, notably the "Indian Logic Knowledge Base", funded by the European Commission (http://www.istb.univie.ac.at/cgi-bin/ilkb/ilkb.cgi). She currently carries out a research project on the theory of reflexive awareness (svasamvedana) in Dharmakirti's Pramāṇavārttika at the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies of the University of Vienna. Together with Helmut Tauscher and Helmut Krasser, Birgit Kellner edits the monograph series "Vienna Studies in Tibetology and Buddhism" (http://www.istb.univie.ac.at/cgi-bin/wstb/wstb.cgi), and together with Helmut Krasser, she acts as editor-in-chief of the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies.
Friday-Sunday, March 28-30, 2008
Buddhist Studies Conference and Workshop
Asilomar Conference Ground, Pacific Grove
Faculty and graduate students only
Detailed conference information for participants is available at http://ieas.berkeley.edu/asilomarconference.
Thursday, March 20, 2008, 5:00 pm
Numata Lecture
Rupert Gethin, University of Bristol
The Word of the Buddha or the Disputations of his Disciples? The Buddhist Path as Presented in the Pali Nikāyas
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Thai painting (19th century) depicting the Buddha flanked by his two chief disciples, Sāriputta and Moggallāna
The Pali Nikāyas contain a number of different schemes of the Buddhist path. These schemes are characteristically set out in the Nikāyas by way of variations on stock formulas presented in a variety of narrative frames. It has been argued by scholars that these different schemes represent competing voices within early Buddhist texts, and some scholars even argue that it is possible to identify the authentic voice of the Buddha among these voices. Such an approach assumes that the Nikāyas are best considered as the end result of a somewhat haphazard and unsystematic process of compilation and redaction that reveals instances of incoherence and inconsistency which can then be used as a basis for distinguishing between early and late in the different path schemes. Rupert Gethin argues that such an approach has overlooked the extent to which the Nikāyas are a systematically redacted whole: the product of a particular process of compilation and editing which the compilers and editors deliberately employed in order to present a particular vision of the Buddhist path. Analysing the schemes and formulas both numerically and contextually, Gethin attempts to articulate what the vision was by establishing what the compilers of the Nikāyas wished to highlight and emphasize in their presentation of the Buddhist path.
Rupert Gethin is the Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhist Studies at UC-Berkeley for Spring 2008. He is Reader in Buddhist Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, and co-director of the Centre for Buddhist Studies, at the University of Bristol, and (since 2003) President of the Pali Text Society. He holds a BA in Comparative Religion (1980), a Masters Degree in Buddhist Studies (1982), and a PhD in Buddhist Studies (1987), all from the University of Manchester. He was appointed Lecturer in Indian Religions by the University of Bristol in 1987, and then Reader In Buddhist Studies in 2005. His 1998 book The Foundations of Buddhism is frequently used in university-level classes on Buddhism in English-speaking countries.
Friday, March 14, 2008, 12:00-2:00 pm
CBS Silk Road Initiative Lecture and Workshop
Madhuvanti Ghose, Art Institute of Chicago
Chinese and Indian Buddha Images: A Study of Early Cultural Interaction
3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
Buddha dated 338, Hebei Province, China (Asian Art Museum, San Francisco)
Madhuvanti Ghose is the Alsdorf Associate Curator of Indian, Southeast Asian, Himalayan and Islamic Art at The Art Institute of Chicago. She is responsible for the exhibition, expansion, preservation and research of the institute's holdings in these fields. Dr. Ghose was previously a Lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and a Research Fellow in the Department of Eastern Art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. She specialises in ancient Indian art and iconography. The interaction of South Asia with the Hellenistic, Roman, Near/Middle Eastern, Iranian, Central Asian and Chinese worlds from the Bronze Age to the coming of Islam is another major area of research activity. Her forthcoming publications include: From Nisa to Niya: New Discoveries and Studies in Central and Inner Asian Art and Archaeology (co-editor, forthcoming 2008), The Origins of Indian Cult Images (2008) and A Catalogue of the Gandhara and Central Asian Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (2009). She is one of the co-founders of the Circle of Inner Asian Art (CIAA) which promotes the pre-Islamic art of Central Asia worldwide.
A facsimile of a message inscribed on a bar of gold from the ruler known as Empress Wu to the gods of Taoism, discovered in 1982. This demonstrates her interest in seeking a better future in the afterlife, an aim that - surprisingly to us - could have been met by extensive printing, and probably was.
Monday, March 10, 2008, 5:00 pm
Timothy Barrett, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Religion and the Rise of Printing Reconsidered
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Cosponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies
This talk will pick up from a short paper published in 2001 and not widely circulated which has been cited surprisingly frequently in the absence of any other account of the religious roots of printing in China. The remarks in that paper are now to be restated and extended in The Woman Who Discovered Printing, which tries to set out a provisional narrative of the factors affecting printing up till the end of the Tang dynasty. But after completing this account, consideration of what happened next, in the early decades of the tenth century, has suggested to me that we need to look carefully at the political and social factors prevailing at that point to understand the widespread acceptance of printing thereafter. And once again, we need to look very carefully at religious materials to get some picture of what was going on, even if paradoxically they have nothing to do with printing at all.
T.H. Barrett graduated from Cambridge and received his doctorate from Yale. After teaching at Cambridge for over ten years he became Professor of East Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, in 1986, where he has taught ever since, first in the Department of History and more recently in the Department of the Study of Religions. He has published Li Ao: Buddhist, Taoist, or Neo-Confucian (1992), Taoism under the T'ang (1996), and a number of other studies; his next book, "The Woman Who Discovered Printing," is to be published by Yale in London by the end of March.
Thursday, February 28, 2008, 5:00 pm
Jacqueline Stone, Princeton University
Is There Still Buddhism outside Japan? Some Thirteenth-Century Perspectives
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Co-sponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies
"Having vowed to journey to India, the monk Xuanzang (602-664) dreams of crossing the ocean and ascending Mt. Sumeru" (from the Genjō Sanzō-e, late 13th century)
Buddhist thinkers in premodern Japan were keenly aware of Japan's location at the extreme eastern edge of the Buddhist world. Contrasting rhetorics alternately maintained that Japan occupied a soteriologically disadvantaged status as a marginal country in a degenerate age, far from the time and place of the historical Buddha, or that, despite its peripheral position, Japan enjoyed a strong, even privileged connection to the dharma. Historians have long been interested in early medieval representations of Japan for what light they may shed on the beginnings of national consciousness. In their own time, however, such representations formed part of a standard framework for Buddhist discourse and were deployed to advance competing definitions of normative Budddhist practice. This paper will examine how some early medieval figures, notably Eisai (1141-1214) and Nichiren (1222-1282), deliberately juxtaposed the two contrasting rhetorics about Japan to promote their own visions of what Buddhism should be.
Jacqueline Stone received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of California, Los Angeles. Currently she is professor of Japanese Religions in the Religion Department at Princeton University and co-director of Princeton's Buddhist Studies Workshop. She is the author of Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (1999) and, with Bryan J. Cuevas, co-editor of The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations (2007). Her research interests include Buddhist intellectual history; medieval Japanese Buddhism; traditions based on the Lotus Sutra, including Tendai and Nichiren; Buddhist approaches to death and dying; and transformations of Buddhism in modern Japan.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008, 4:00 pm
IEAS Book Series: New Perspectives on East Asia
Penelope Edwards, UC Berkeley
Cambodge: the Cultivation of a Nation
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Co-sponsored by the Institute of East Asian Studies and the Center for Southeast Asia Studies
Penelope Edwards is a cultural historian of Cambodia and Burma whose research and teaching interests include Southeast Asian modern literary and print cultures, Buddhism, gender, French colonialism, nationalism, race theory, urban studies and Chinese diaspora.
Thursday, February 14, 2008, 5:00 pm
Collett Cox, University of Washington
Bark unto Dust: Recovering the Ancient Buddhist Texts of Gandhāra
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Between 1994 and the present, several collections of early Indian Buddhist manuscripts written in the Gāndhārī language and Kharoṣṭhī script have come to light. Significant as the earliest (1st-2nd cent. CE) texts of any type yet to have been discovered in greater South Asia, these texts also provide unparalleled evidence for reconstructing the early history of Buddhist text styles and textual collections. These early Gāndhārī Buddhist manuscripts are currently being studied and published under the auspices of the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project (University of Washington).
Following a brief overview of the collections and of certain methodological and text-critical issues that these manuscripts raise, this presentation will explore the practical side of working with such manuscripts, from the initial stages of preservation and reconstruction through the process of formulating an edition, translation, and contextual interpretation. After setting out the specifics of manuscript work, the discussion will turn to one particular manuscript, a fragment of a polemical, scholastic or Abhidharma text that treats the controversial issue, "everything exists." We will examine, as time permits, its contents, its argument structure, and its significance for the emergence of the scholastic commentarial genre and for our understanding of early Indian Buddhist sectarianism.
Collett Cox received her Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia University and is currently Professor of Sanskrit and Buddhist Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington. Her field is early Indian Buddhism, specifically scholastic or Abhidharma texts. She is currently Associate Director of the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project at the University of Washington, which is engaged in the study and publication of recently discovered early Indian Buddhist manuscripts from Gandhāra.
Thursday, November 29, 2007, 5:00 pm
CBS Silk Road Initiative Inaugural Lecture
Etienne de la Vaissière, École Pratique des Hautes Études
A Strange Buddha for Strange Buddhists: The Silk Road and the Sogdians
The Great Hall, Bancroft Hotel, 2680 Bancroft Way
A reception will follow
The Sogdians — from Samarkand, Bukhara or Tashkent — are usually regarded as playing a great role in the early Buddhist missions to China. However, the evidence for Buddhism in Sogdiana is very limited, and most of the Sogdian Buddhist texts seem to be translated from Chinese. Similarly, are we so sure that the Sogdians were actually the main Buddhist missionaries among the Turkic peoples? A recently discovered image of a strange Sogdian Buddha might offer a clue for an historical interpretation of the precise role of the Sogdian traders in the history of the Buddhist Far East.
Etienne de la Vaissière is Associate Professor at l'École pratique des hautes etudes (EPHE) in Paris. His area of specialization is the economic and social history of pre-Islamic and early Islamic Central Asia. In addition to numerous journal articles, he is the author of Sogdian Traders: A History (2005), and Samarcande et Samarra (2007).
Sunday, November 18, 2007, 4:30 pm
Sankara
Roxie Theater, San Francisco
The Center for Buddhist Studies is pleased to co-present:
SANKARA
4:30 pm, Sunday, November 18th
Roxie Theater, San Francisco
Ananda, a Buddhist monk arrives at a village to restore the temple's paintings - moral tales which depict the trap of the five senses. When he chances upon a young woman's hairpin, he sets off on a reverie of worldly passion. One night, the paintings are destroyed and Ananda patiently begins his work all over again - it is then that he sees his own condition reflected in the paintings. Meditative & painterly, this film was Official Selection at the Rotterdam & London Film Festivals, and won the Special Jury Prize at the Cairo International Film Festival.
Sankara is Prasanna Jayakody's (1968- ) directorial debut film. Visual allure has been his aesthetic trademark, but his ability to articulate the Sinhala Buddhist ethos is the hallmark of his remarkable career. He debuted at the age of 21 with Seveneli saha Minissu (Shadows and Men), a stage drama thematically woven around a thoughtful discussion on the reality of life, which was a major critical success.
Admission: $9
Country: Sri Lanka (2006)
Running Time: 87 min; - US Premiere
In English
For tickets and further information about Sankara and the S.F. International South Asian Film Festival, please visit http://www.thirdi.org/festival/film/sankara.htm.
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 5:00 pm
Maria Heim, Amherst College
The Conceit of Self-Loathing
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
This talk will explore the psychological intricacies of Theravādin interpretations of the "conceit of inferiority" (omāna), which is considered to be one of the standard types of pride or conceit (māna). Considering oneself inferior involves an inflated and contrived construction of oneself, akin to other varieties of conceit. Yet the conceit of inferiority is a curious form of pride, involving as it does much self-abasement, disparagement, and despising of oneself. Looking primarily at Abhidhamma texts, Professor Heim will investigate questions about the nature of pride and humility in Buddhist thought, the psychology of self-loathing, and the affective dimensions of self-knowledge.
Maria Heim is an assistant professor of Buddhist Studies at Amherst College. She works primarily on the Theravada, and is currently working on a book about Buddhist theories of intention and the springs of moral action.
Friday-Saturday, November 2-3, 2007
Daoism Conference
Quanzhen Daoism in Modern Chinese Society and Culture: An International Symposium: 全真道與近現代中國社會和文化: 國際學術研討會
Toll Room, The Alumni House
Co-sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités, CNRS-EPHE, Paris, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Center for the Study of Religion and Culture, Graduate Theological Union, and Department of History
Detailed program information is available at http://ieas.berkeley.edu/events/2007.11.02.html
Thursday-Saturday, October 18-20, 2007
Text, Translation, and Transmission
Conference in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Numata Chair Program
Toll Room, Alumni House
Detailed program information is available at http://ieas.berkeley.edu/numataconference
Thursday, September 27, 2007, 5:00 pm
Padmanabh S. Jaini, UC-Berkeley (Emeritus)
Buddhism and Warfare: A Note on Mahāvaṃsa 25, 110
A special lecture to celebrate the establishment of the Padmanabh S. Jaini Graduate Student Award in Buddhist Studies
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Responses by UCLA Professors Gregory Schopen and Robert Buswell
The war for the relics of the Buddha, Great Stupa at Sanchi, c. 50 BCE
The "Buddhist" Nationalism of Ceylon (late 19th and early 20th century) had its roots in the Saṅgha-led agitation against the five hundred years of missionary activities during the successive Christian rule of that island by the Portuguese (1505-1638), the Dutch (1638-1795), and the British (1814-1947).
In the wake of independence that "religious" nationalism became transformed into an "ethnic" nationalism, claiming primacy for Buddhist education as well as for the Sinhalese over Tamil (the language of the minority), thus sowing the seeds of a bloody separatist movement. This was partly inspired by the widely read accounts of the victory of the Buddhist Sinhala hero Duṭṭhagāmaṇi Abhaya (101-77 B.C.E.) over the Damiḷa (Tamil) ruler Eḷāra (145-101 B.C.E.) in a bloody war, after which the king grieved over the dead, feared for his own rebirth in heaven, but was assured of his "innocence" by a group of arahants.
All this is detailed in the epic Mahāvaṃsa, hailed as a Buddhist Chronicle by its editor and translator W. Geiger (1908). Much has been written about the ensuing Sri Lankan political developments in the papers edited by Smith Bardwell in his Religion and Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka (1978) and by G. Obeysekere in his "Duṭṭhagāmaṇī and the Buddhist Conscience" (1992).
Professor Jaini will examine the doctrinal implications of the grounds for "absolution" granted by the arahants in an act of warfare by a Buddhist king, apparently for the glory of the Dhamma.
Padmanabh S. Jaini is Professor emeritus of Buddhist Studies and co-founder of the Group in Buddhist Studies. Before joining UC Berkeley in 1972, he taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of numerous monographs and articles on both Buddhism and Jainism. In the field of Buddhist Studies he is particularly well known for his work on Abhidharma and for his critical editions of the Abhidharmadīpa (a Vaibhāṣika treatise), the Sāratamā (a commentary on the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā), and a collection of apocryphal Jātakas, the Paññāsa-Jātaka, that appeared in four volumes (text and translation). His collected essays have appeared in two volumes, and, recently, he has been honored by a Festschrift (2003) with contributions on early Buddhism and Jainism.
Click here to view a webcast of the "Buddhism and Warfare" talk by Padmanabh S. Jaini.
Thursday, September 20, 2007, 5:00 pm
Max Deeg, Cardiff University
Places Seen – Places Imagined: Reflections on Xuanzang's Xiyu-ji ("Records of the Western Regions")
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Due to the scarce textual material for the study of the history of Indian Buddhism, the travel accounts of the Chinese pilgrims, especially Xuanzang's text, the Xiyu-ji, "Records of the Western world," have attracted the attention of scholars working in fields such as archaeology, history of arts, history of religion (especially Buddhism) and history in general, etc. Consequently, there is almost no book written on Indian Buddhism of the first millennium C.E. that does not refer to the pilgrims' reports. These texts have not, however, been studied in a sufficiently comparative and critical way by Western scholars and were not adequately contextualized in relation to information which we have from Indian Buddhist literature, archaeology and history of arts. Nor were they read as a specific genre of Chinese literature. Without taking this kind of research into account it is not possible to draw sound conclusions as to whether the pieces of information related in these texts reflect a historical reality – that is to say "places seen" – or whether they were moulded according to certain patterns of inner-Buddhist or inter- or innercultural topoi. This lecture explores one example where it can be shown that Xuanzang, in his Xiyu-ji, construed a complete description of an Indian region, Mathurā, probably without having travelled there and solely on the basis of information available to him in Chinese Buddhist texts. It will be argued that this was not for reasons of forging evidence but as a consequence of the very purpose of the text, written, as it was, for the Chinese emperor in order to provide a complete overview of Buddhist India.
Max Deeg is Senior Lecturer in Buddhist Studies at Cardiff University in Wales. He received his Ph.D. in Indian Studies and his Habilitation (professoral degree) in Religious Studies from the University of Würzburg. He taught German in Taiwan and Japan before joining the Religious Studies faculty at the University of Vienna from 2002-2005. His most recent publication is a German translation of Kumārajīva's Lotussutra.
Thursday-Friday, April 26-27, 2007
Exploring Esoteric Rituals in Early East Asian Buddhism
Faculty Workshop
Tuesday, April 24, 2007, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Two Revivals of Buddhist Education in East Tibet
Panel Discussion
Ida and Robert Sproul Rooms, International House, UC Berkeley
Khenpo Phuntsok Namgyal
Abbot
Dzongsar Khamje Institute, Derge, Eastern Tibet
Lodre Phuntso
Principal Administrator
Dzongsar Khamje Institute, Derge, Eastern Tibet
Lama Sonam Phuntsho
Translator
The structures of modern Tibetan Buddhist monastic education are often traced to the efforts of Jamgön Kongtrul and Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, two 19th-century scholars and innovators based in East Tibet (Kham). Considered as leaders of a movement toward nonsectarianism (Rimé), the two revived interest in many forgotten traditions of Tibetan Buddhism and shifted the emphasis of monastic education away from sectarian commentaries and back to the shared roots of the tradition. The present abbot of the monastic college at Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo's Dzongsar Monastery will discuss this 19th-century reformation and its effects upon monastic education in Tibet. This monastic college was one of many destroyed during the violence of the Cultural Revolution. It was rebuilt in the 1980's largely through the efforts of Lodre Phuntsok, a traditional Tibetan physician and the author of a history of Dzongsar Monastery. Dr. Lodre Phuntsok will relate the story of this 20th-century revitalization of Buddhism in East Tibet with a focus on the monastic college.
Co-sponsored by the Khyentse Foundation
Thursday, April 19, 2007, 5:00 pm
Numata Lecture
Koichi Shinohara, Yale University
The Wonder-working Monk Reveals Himself to be the Twelve-headed Avalokitesvara: Miracle or Esoteric Ritual?
3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
Yü Chün-fang in her learned study of Avalokitesvara observes that certain famous wonder-working monks were later identified with Avalokitesvara. Baozhi, for example, is said to have "peeled off his face" in front of Emperor Gao of Qi dynasty and then Emperor Wu of Liang dynasty and revealed himself to be the Twelve-faced Avalokitesvara. I will argue that this connection between figures like Baozhi and Avalokitesvara reflects a late development in Chinese Buddhism, and that the story offers us a clue to the growth of the esoteric cult Avalokitesvara, which may have spread by adopting popular cults such as those of "divine" monks.
Koichi Shinohara is the Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley for Spring 2007. He is a senior lecturer of Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University, where he works primarily on Buddhism in East Asia. For the past several years his work has centered around the writings of an influential commentator on monastic practices and historian Daoxuan (596-677) and his collaborator Daoshi (d.u.) at the Ximingsi monastery in the capital city. Among his current projects is the study of the cult of a deity with a terrifying appearance, Shensha or Jinja ("Deep Sand"). This cult originated in China in connection with the story of a famous pilgrim to India and later became popular in Japan, where a temple bearing the name of the deity continues to flourish outside of Tokyo.
Thursday, March 22, 2007, 5:00 pm
Phyllis Granoff, Yale University
Karma, Curse, or Divine Illusion: The Destruction of the Buddha's Clan and the Slaughter of the Yâdavas
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
The early Indian tradition knows of two instances of genocide in which the clan of a famous person was slaughtered. They are the slaughter of the Buddha's own clan, the Sakyas, and the slaughter of the Yâdavas, relatives of the god Krsna. This paper examines the treatment of the genocides in a range of texts, including the Pali Jatakas, Mahabharata, Bhagavata Purana, and vernacular versions of the epic from Northeast India.
Phyllis Granoff received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in Sanskrit and Indian Studies and Fine Arts. She is presently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley (Spring 2007). She teaches at Yale University in the Department of Religious Studies and serves as the Chair of the South Asian Studies Council. Her research interests include the development of classical Hinduism, medieval Jainism, and early Mahayana approaches to image worship.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007, 4:00 pm
Understanding Tibetan Monastic Music in the 21st Century
Panel Discussion
Seaborg Room, Faculty Club
Learn more about Tibetan musical structure and theory in preparation for the evening's performance by the Gyuto Monks. Benjamin Bogin (Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley), Keila Diehl (Anthropology, Stanford University), and Jessie Wallner (Ethnomusicology, Indiana University) will situate the monks' performance in the context of the history of Tibetan monastic rituals, including the cultural transformations that occur when a ritual is displaced from the monastery to the stage. Co-sponsored by Cal Performances, the Institute of East Asian Studies, and the Center for Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley.
Thursday, March 8, 2007
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
4:00 - 4:30 pm Dorji Wangchuk, University of Hamburg
Much Ado About the Appearance and Perception of Water: Attempts Made by the Four Major Schools of Tibetan Buddhism to Resolve Ontological and Epistemological Problems
4:30 - 4:45 pm Q&A
4:45 - 5:00 pm coffee break
5:00 - 5:30 pm Orna Almogi, University of Hamburg
Does a Buddha Possess Gnosis (jñāna: ye shes)? A Dispute Among Madhyamaka Exponents in India and Tibet
5:30 - 5:45 pm Q&A
Much Ado About the Appearance and Perception of Water: Attempts Made by the Four Major Schools of Tibetan Buddhism to Resolve Ontological and Epistemological Problems
Tibetan Buddhist scholars generally tried to adhere to the doctrines of Indian Buddhism, but we do encounter philosophical theories and interpretations that are purely Tibetan, typically due to the scholars' attempts to resolve conflicts and inconsistencies found in the heterogeneous Indian Buddhist scriptures and systems. The varying Tibetan positions on the ontological status of water and the validity of its perception re intriguing examples. According to Indian Buddhist sources, sentient beings of different realms are said to perceive what is known to humans as 'water' differently. Tibetan Buddhist scholars have pondered whether there is a common and shared object of perception, and if so, what it is. Further, they consider whether any of these perceptions are valid, and if so, which and why? Wangchuk will show how scholars from the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism came to their various conclusions and point out the possible practical (e.g. ethical) implications of such theoretical deliberations.
Dorji Wangchuk is at present a lector (Tibetology) and research scholar (Indo-Tibetan Buddhism) at the Department of Indian and Tibetan Studies, University of Hamburg. His general area of interest lies in the intellectual history and philosophy of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism (i.e. Abhidharma, Pramāna, Yogācāra, Madhyamaka, Prajñāpāramitā, Tantra, and rDzogs-chen). His most recent study, "The Resolve to Become a Buddha: A Study of the Bodhicitta Concept in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism" (forthcoming), deals with the various aspects of tantric and non-tantric Mahāyāna soteriology centering on the idea of bodhicitta ('the resolve to [attain the highest state of] awakening'). Currently he is preparing a critical edition of the *Guhyagarbhatantra, an important tantric scripture of the rNying-ma school of Tibetan Buddhism.
Does a Buddha Possess Gnosis (jñāna: ye shes)? A Dispute Among Madhyamaka Exponents in India and Tibet
A controversy concerning the existence and nature of the buddha's gnosis (jñāna: ye shes) apparently emerged in India in the 7th or 8th centuries and reached its peak in the 11th century, with the growing influence of Yogācāra-Madhyamaka, the followers of which adopted various Yogācāra theories of knowledge for establishing the conventional truth. The debate surrounding the existence of gnosis was taken up by various Tibetan scholars with great interest, and discussions of it have continued to the present day. Almogi will discuss the different positions of the Madhyamaka subschools on this issue, as presented by the 11th-century Tibetan scholar Rong-zom Chos-kyi-bzang-po, and will provide a summary of the main issues of the debate, at the center of which stands the question of how a buddha is able to act in the world for the benefit of living beings.
Orna Almogi is currently an adjunct lecturer for Tibetan Studies at the Department of Indian and Tibetan Studies, University of Hamburg. Her major areas of interest are the different concepts of Buddhahood found in the various Indian and Tibetan Buddhist scriptures as well as doctrinal and historical issues related to the rNying-ma school of Tibetan Buddhism, particularly those surrounding the eleventh-century scholar Rong-zom Chos-kyi-bzang-po. She is also interested in Tibetan literature in general and worked for the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project and its follow-up project, the Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project, for six years, and was responsible for the publication of the CD containing the preliminary list of the Tibetan material microfilmed by the project in Nepal.
Friday, March 2, 2007, 12:00 - 2:00 pm
Richard M. Jaffe, Japanese Religion, Duke University
Buddhist Material Culture and the Construction of Pan-Asianism in Pre-War Japan
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Late-nineteenth and early twentieth century Japanese Buddhism was marked by a wide-ranging fascination with Buddhist origins in India. This Indian turn in Japanese Buddhist circles manifested not only in elite academic scholarship, but also in Buddhist art and architecture. In this paper the speaker considers the early twentieth century artistic and architectural production of Ito Chuta and Otani Kozui to deploy Indian and Southeast Asian Buddhist art as part of the effort to create a universalized Japanese Buddhism.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007, 7:00 pm
Panel discussion
Contemplation and Education - Landscape of Research
Chapel at the Pacific School of Religion - 1798 Scenic Avenue, Berkeley
This panel discussion will feature Father Keating (Christian elder and monk, founder of Centering Prayer Movement); Venerable Tenzin LS Priyadarshi (Buddhist contemplative and Chaplin at MIT); and Doctor Tobin Hart, Ph.D., (Professor of Psychology, University of West Georgia). The panelists will talk about the insights to contemplative practice, current research, and the practical and natural role of contemplation in life-long learning, including formal education.
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Buddhist Studies, Graduate Theological Union, The Impact Foundation, The Prajnopaya Foundation-MIT, and Contemplative Outreach.
Friday-Saturday, February 9-10, 2007
Does Humor Belong in Buddhism?
Toll Room, Alumni House
The Buddha Shakyamuni is said to have asked, "How can anyone laugh who knows of old age, disease, and death?" Despite the severity of this rhetorical question, Buddhists through the centuries and across cultures have incorporated humor into their religious lives. The literary, ritual, and artistic traditions of the Buddhist world contain a variety of humorous and comedic elements that challenge the representation of Buddhism as a humorless doctrine of detached austerity. As a result of this image of Buddhism, scholars have tended to view humorous elements of Buddhist texts and practices as anomalous or marginal rather than as vibrant and vital aspects of Buddhist traditions. This workshop will explore the role of humor in Buddhism from early canonical theories of humor and the unexpectedly robust comedy of the rules for monks and nuns to the outrageous behavior of tantric gurus and Zen Masters. Confirmed participants include Benjamin Bogin (UC Berkeley), Jacob Dalton (Yale University), Georges Dreyfus (Williams College), Janet Gyatso (Harvard University), Charles Hallisey (University of Wisconsin), Natasha Heller (UC Berkeley), Donald Lopez (University of Michigan), Reiko Ohnuma (Dartmouth College), James Robson (University of Michigan), Gregory Schopen (UCLA), Robert Sharf (UC Berkeley), George Tanabe (University of Hawaii), and Alexander von Rospatt (UC Berkeley).
Detailed program information is available at http://ieas.berkeley.edu/events/humor
Thursday, February 1, 2007, 4:00 - 5:30 pm
Susan Whitfield, Director, International Dunhuang Project, British Library, London
The Discovery of Buddhism on the Silk Road
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
The Eastern Silk Road's Buddhist ruins and relics are now well-known. Yet in the late nineteenth century they were still hidden by the desert sands. It was the curiosity of scholars such as Stein which led to their discovery and the start of scholarship in this area. Just as Buddhism traveled from India through Central Asia, so the rediscovery of its sacred sites made the same journey. This lecture will tell the story of the scholars and their finds and consider how far - or how little - we have traveled in our own journey of understanding Buddhism in this region.
For more information, please contact: Kimberly Carl, kcarl@berkeley.edu.
Co-sponsored by The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, Berkeley China Initiative, Caucasus and Central Asia Program, Center for Chinese Studies, East Asian Library, and Institute of East Asian Studies.
Thursday, January 25, 2007, 5:00 pm
Jinhua Chen, Associate Professor, Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia
Reading Chinese Buddhist Monastic Hagiographies: A New Approach
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Scholars have developed various approaches to the study of Buddhist monastic hagiographies and biographies, each of which have their merits and demerits. This talk explores a new approach that promises to be more balanced and productive; it seeks to preserve the merits of older approaches while at the same time avoiding their shortcomings.
Jinhua Chen teaches East Asian Buddhism at the University of British Columbia. His research covers monastic historiography and biography, state-church relationshipin medieval China and Heian Buddhism.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies, UC Berkeley.
Thursday, December 7, 2006, 5:00 pm
Oliver Freiberger, Assistant Professor, Department of Asian Studies, University of Texas at Austin
The Heart of the Buddha's Message? The Middle Way and Other Disputed Concepts in Early Buddhism
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
This talk will explore divergent voices and views in early Buddhist literature in order to raise a fundamental question: is there a central core to early Buddhist doctrine, and are we able to identify it? The talk will focus on the pivotal teaching of the Middle Way among other important topics. The Middle Way may be viewed as a rhetorical tool that was used in certain Buddhist circles to attack not only non-Buddhists but also different factions within the Buddhist community.
Oliver Freiberger teaches Asian religions, in particular Buddhism, and method and theory of religious studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include the early history of Buddhism in India, asceticism, and comparison in the study of religion. He has published a book on early doctrinal interpretations of the Buddhist monastic order and co-edited three volumes on various topics in the history of Asian religions (a fourth one is in preparation). A volume on Asceticism and Its Critics, edited by Dr. Freiberger, was recently published. His current research focuses on the comparison of ascetic beliefs and practices in India and early Christianity.
Thursday, November 9, 2006, 5:00 pm
John McRae, The University of Tokyo
Comparing the Buddhisms of East and Southeast Asia: A World Historical Perspective
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
In preparing a general survey of East Asian Buddhism, I have avoided telling parallel stories of separate national traditions in favor of an integrated macro-regional perspective. The oral presentation was inspired by a brief stint teaching in Thailand, which led me to compare the Buddhisms of East and Southeast Asia, with attention to geographical, anthropological, and political features, all undertaken with a world historical perspective.
John R. McRae did his Ph.D. under Stanley Weinstein at Yale and has taught at Cornell and Indiana Universities. Currently a visiting scholar at The University of Tokyo, he will be teaching a course on early Chinese Chan at Komazawa University in Tokyo beginning in April 2007.
Thursday, November 2, 2006, 5:00 pm
Vesna Wallace, Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, UC Santa Barbara
The Interplay of Buddhism and Law in Pre-communist Mongolia
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Since the early 17th century until 1918, religious Buddhist and secular laws in Mongolia frequently and in various degrees fused into a single system of jurisprudence, thus invariably influencing each other. In her presentation, Professor Wallace will discuss the ways in which these influences shaped Mongolian Buddhism and legal consciousness of the Mongols.
Vesna Wallace is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her research interests focus on the comparative analysis of the Buddhist traditions of South Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia. Recent publications include The Kalacakratantra: The Chapter on the Individual Together with the Vimalaprabha (2004) and The Inner Kalacakratantra: A Buddhist Tantric View of the Individual (2001). She has also published a series of articles on Indian tantric Buddhism and produced three documentary films on contemporary Mongolia. Her latest book The Kalacakratantra: The Chapter on Sadhana is in press at Columbia University.
Friday, November 3, 2006
Graduate student conference, Stanford University
Thurday, October 5, 2006, 5:00 pm
Catherine Bell, Santa Clara University
"Do Buddhists Believe? Not Exactly the Same Old Question"
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th floor
Drawing on a larger book project on the issue of belief (using religious studies and anthropology methods), Bell picks up the argument in which Donald Lopez found the concept neither natural nor universal. For Lopez, Buddhism has suffered the effects of a collision with Christian and Western colonial categories like "belief." New work in cognitive theory, even when assessed by anthropologists active in the field, like Maurice Bloch, suggests more nuanced attempts to mediate universality as we need it as scholars and particularity as we experience it in the cultural materials we study.
Catherine Bell is the Bernard J. Hanley Professor of Religious Studies and former chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University. She has written two books on ritual, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (1992) and Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (1997), with a forthcoming edited volume, Teaching Ritual (Oxford/AAR Series), as well as many articles on manuscript and printed texts in Chinese popular religion. She is currently on leave to complete a book entitled Believing.
Saturday, September 30, 2006, 6:30 pm
"Milarepa"
Wheeler Auditorium, UC Berkeley
From the producers of The Cup and Travelers and Magicians comes the true story of Tibet's greatest saint, Milarepa. In this account of his early life, we encounter the forces that propelled him onto the path to enlightenment—betrayal, magic, demons, vengeance… and awakening. Directed by Tibetan Lama Neten Chokling Rinpoche, this film is of interest for anyone concerned with the cycle of violence and retribution consuming today's world.
6:30 pm Screening of Milarepa, Wheeler Auditorium
8:00 pm Q & A with the Director, Neten Chokling Rinpoche
9:00 pm Benefit Reception
Please call 877-697-2998 or order tickets online.
Co-sponsored by the Conservancy for Tibetan Art and Culture.
Thursday, September 7, 2006, 5:00 pm
Paul Harrison, Visiting Professor, Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University
The Riddle of Tabo: The Origin and Fate of a West Tibetan Manuscript Collection
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
The surviving fragments of an enormous manuscript library in the West Tibetan Monastery of Tabo, founded in 996 C.E., confront researchers with many problems and challenges. How and when was this huge collection produced? Who or what was responsible for the unbelievable state of damage and disorder in which it was found at the start of the 20th century? The work of cataloguing these sacred remains, much of it carried out "in the field" at Tabo, casts new light on the development of the Buddhist canon, and on the history of West Tibet, the cradle of the Tibetan Buddhist renaissance in the 10th-11th centuries.
Paul Harrison was until recently Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch New Zealand. During the Fall and Winter Quarters he will be a Visiting Professor at Stanford University. His research interests include the history and literature of Mahayana Buddhism (especially Mahayana sutras), the study of Sanskrit Buddhist manuscripts, and the development of the Tibetan canon.
Friday–Sunday, May 5–7, 2006
Conference
Tibetan Religion and State in the 17th and 18th Centuries: Tibetan, Chinese, and Mongolian Perspectives
Lipman Room, Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley
The 17th and 18th centuries were watershed periods in the history of Tibetan religious and political life. It was during this pivotal era that Tibet witnessed the rise to power of the incarnate Dalai Lamas and the establishment of a centralized government in the capital city of Lhasa under the leadership of the Fifth Dalai Lama (1617-1682). In the century following the political ascent of the Fifth Dalai Lama, far-reaching changes unfolded in almost every sphere of Tibetan cultural life and social organization. The central government's efforts to innovate and exert control were felt in areas ranging from administration to commerce, from monastic curriculum to public festival life, from ritual performance to medical and legal practice. At the same time, response and resistance to these changes fostered a vibrant flourishing among groups at the social and geographic margins of Tibet. These changes in the Tibetan polity also involved complex negotiations of Tibet's relations with Mongolian, Manchu, and Chinese neighbors.
In recent years, the increasing availability of Tibetan language documents, the growth of the academic study of Tibet, and productive collaborations with scholars in China and Tibet have inspired vital new research on the specific events of the period and the broad social and political currents that connect them. This conference will highlight original research by many scholars working on diverse topics within the history of 17th and 18th century Tibet and will seek to redefine our understanding of the period through discussion of the connections between them. Confirmed participants include Patricia Berger (UC Berkeley), Benjamin Bogin (UC Berkeley), Timothy Brook (University of British Columbia), Bryan J. Cuevas (UC Berkeley), Jacob Dalton (Yale University), Johan Elverskog (Southern Methodist University), Janet Gyatso (Harvard University), Leonard van der Kuijp (Harvard University), Matthew Kapstein (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris/University of Chicago), Nancy Lin (UC Berkeley), Derek Maher (East Carolina University), Kurtis R. Schaeffer (University of Virginia), Tsering Shakya (University of British Columbia), E. Gene Smith (New York) and Gray Tuttle (Columbia University).
Detailed program information available at http://ieas.berkeley.edu/events/tibetanreligionandstate
Thursday, May 4, 2006, 5:00 pm
William Bodiford, Professor, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA
The Birth of Japanese Buddhism: Books, Publishing, and the Awakening of Sectarian Consciousness in Tokugawa-Period Japan
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
What was the role of print culture in the creation of the religious teachings that today are universally recognized as being Japanese Buddhism? What can an examination of this topic reveal about Buddhism in Japan?
William Bodiford is a Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. His research focuses on medieval and modern religions, especially Buddhism, in Japan and East Asia. He is the associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism (2004), editor of Going Forth: Visions of Buddhist Vinaya (2005), and author of Soto Zen in Medieval Japan (1989).
Monday, April 10, 2006, 5:00 pm
Oliver Freiberger, Assistant Professor, Department of Asian Studies, University of Texas
Berkeley-Stanford Buddhist Studies Colloquium
What Makes Holy Scriptures Holy? Rethinking the Idea of a Buddhist Canon
Stanford University, room to be announced
Saturday, March 18, 2006, 9:30 am-6:00 pm
Workshop
Buddhism at Dunhuang
Toll Room, Alumni House, UC Berkeley
In the hundred years since the discovery of the hidden library at the Mogao cave complex near the oasis town of Dunhuang (Gansu Province, PRC), scholars have made significant strides towards preserving, cataloging, and interpreting the large number of manuscripts and material objects recovered from the site. In addition, they have greatly advanced our knowledge of both the layout and iconography of the caves themselves. Despite such advances, a number of questions regarding the actual practice of Buddhism at Dunhuang remain unanswered, including those related to the on-site production and circulation of Buddhist manuscripts, the development and cross-fertilization of local Buddhist traditions, as well as the function of the individual cave temples within the larger context of Buddhist ritual culture along the ancient Silk Road. Detailed program information available at http://ieas.berkeley.edu/events/dunhuang.
Thursday, March 16, 2006, 5:00 pm
Mudagamuwe Maithrimurthi, Visiting Lecturer of Buddhist Studies, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan
Benevolence, Compassion, Joyousness and Equanimity: Cultivation of Mind, Ethics and Soteriology in Buddhism
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Mudagamuwe Maithrimurthi will discuss aspects of the so-called four Brahmic States (brahmavihâra) or Immeasurables (apramâna). The analysis will also contain an investigation of the pre-Buddhist background of these concepts, their historical development within the frame of early Buddhist thought and their Mahâyâna reinterpretation and re-evaluation.
Mudagamuwe Maithrimurthi currently teaches Buddhist Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. He previously taught at the University of Leipzig, Germany. A native of Sri Lanka, he holds a Ph.D. in Classical Indology from the University of Hamburg, Germany.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006, 4:15-5:30 pm
Maithrimurthi Mudagamuwe, Visiting Lecturer of Buddhist Studies, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan
Berkeley-Stanford Buddhist Studies Colloquium
Consciousness, Self and Intermediate State: Some Problems in Theravada Buddhism
Building 60, Room 61G (Main Quad, next to Memorial Church), Stanford University
Friday, March 10, 2006, 7:00-8:00 pm
Bryan Cuevas, Professor, Assistant Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies, Florida State University.
Berkeley-Stanford Buddhist Studies Colloquium
Family Matters: Kinship Bonds and Buddhist History in Tibet
Building 200 (History Corner), Room 030 (Lower Level), Stanford University
Thursday, March 2, 2006, 5:00 pm
Per Sörensen, Professor, Institute of Central Asian Studies, University of Leipzig, Germany
Buddhism and the Environment: The Birth of Flood Control Politics and Disaster Management in the Battle for Lhasa's Jo-khang Temple
341 Dwinelle Hall
Per Sörensen will discuss the importance of environmental protection, particularly water conservation, in a Buddhist society. He will focus on the protection of one of the holiest sanctuaries in Central Asia: Jo-khang Temple in the heart of the Tibetan capital Lhasa. He will demonstrate how the struggle for pre-eminence in safeguarding and maintaining this holy site became an important component of hegemonic and political supremacy in Tibet.
Per Sörensen teaches at the University of Leipzig. He is a specialist in Tibetan and Bhutanese history and literature. The author of numerous books, his most recent publication is Thundering Falcon - An Inquiry into the History and Cult of Khra-'brug, Tibet's first Buddhist Temple.
Thursday, February 16, 2006, 5:00 pm
Paul Hackett, Visiting Scholar, Center for Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley
Theos Bernard and 1930s Tibet
370 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
Paul Hackett will discuss the life and legacy of Theos Bernard. Theos Casimir Bernard (1908-1947), a nearly forgotten early pioneer of Indo-Tibetan religious studies and tantric yoga in America, was the third American ever to visit Tibet who, upon his return, promoted himself as the "White Lama of Tibet". Traveling to India and Tibet in the 1930s, Theos Bernard returned to America with a treasure trove of texts, film, still photos, statues, thankas, and ritual implements, which have since been scattered across the United States, including a sizable collection at UC Berkeley. Paul Hackett is the author of A Tibetan Verb Lexicon: Verbs, Classes, and Syntactic Frames (Snow Lion, 2003) and is currently completing a biography of Theos Bernard.
Friday, February 10, 2006, 4:15-5:30 pm
Jonathan Silk, Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA
Berkeley-Stanford Buddhist Studies Colloquium
Incestuous Ancestries: the Family Origins of Gautama Siddhartha and a Comparison with Stories of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 12 & 20
Building 60, Room 61G (Main Quad, next to Memorial Church), Stanford University
Thursday, February 2, 2006, 5:00 pm
Greg Schopen, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA
Locating Buddhist Nuns in the Urban and Cultural Landscape of Early North India
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Older work on Buddhist nuns in India is not particularly interested in the question of where they actually lived. More recent work raises the issue, but is not sufficiently informed and a potential source of confusion. In fact several vinaya traditions contain ample evidence to indicate that the nuns their authors knew, or envisioned, lived – unlike monks – in towns and cities, and were required by rule to do so. Gregory Schopen will present and discuss several texts from one of these traditions, focusing on how their urban location affected the perception of nuns, the problems it created, and the economic activities that it made available to them. The recognition of the textual location of nuns in towns makes it possible to finally identify for the first time several Buddhist nunneries in the archeological record – three such sites will be briefly discussed – and to propose a demographic explanation for the decline or disappearance of Buddhist nuns from medieval India.
Gregory Schopen is a Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. His research focuses on the history of Indian Buddhism, the Mulasarvastiavda-Vinaya, early and medieval Mahayana Sutra literature, and Indian Buddhist epigraphy.
Thursday, December 1, 2005, 5:00 pm
Eugene Wang, Department of Art History, Harvard University
Thinking Outside the Boxes: Nesting Reliquary Caskets from a Ninth-Century Chinese Monastic Crypt
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
An underground crypt was discovered in the Tang-dynasty pagoda basement of a Chinese Buddhist monastery in 1987. The crypt yielded hundreds of precious artifacts donated in the name of the Tang emperors and others, as well as four Buddha relics, one of them now believed by the Buddhist community to be the "authentic" finger-bone of Buddha Sakyamuni. What merits art historical attention in particular is the set of eight nesting reliquary caskets arranged in the manner of Russian dolls. The reliquary contains examples of the earliest surviving mandalas in China. Professor Wang's lecture will unpack the nesting caskets to reveal the vast ancient and medieval Chinese imaginary cosmos embedded therein.
Eugene Y. Wang is Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University. His most recent book is Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (2005). He is the art history associate editor of Encyclopedia of Buddhism (2004). He has widely published on Chinese art and visual culture.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005, 5:00 pm
Harunaga Isaacson, Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Becoming Hevajra
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Professor Isaacson will give an overview of the daily meditative and ritual practice of an initiate into the system of Hevajra, on the basis of a large body of literature in Sanskrit, mostly unpublished, describing this Buddhist tantric practice. He will also comment on the tensions between this form of practice and non-tantric Buddhism, and on how the authors of this corpus attempt to resolve these tensions.
Harunaga Isaacson is Assistant Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His focus is on Sanskrit and classical Indian studies, with special interests in poetry, Puranic literature, Indian philosophy, and Tantric religious practices. He is currently working on a forthcoming monograph entitled, The Practice of Hevajra: Studies in the Sanskrit texts of the Hevajra-cycle.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005, 3:00-5:00 pm
Edward Tompkins Lecture Series
Michael Puett, Professor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
Humans, Ghosts, and Spirits in Chinese Late Antiquity
3335 Dwinelle Hall
Monday, November 14, 2005, 5:00 pm
Gautama Vajracharya
Baby Showers: Ajanta Ceiling Paintings and Festivals of Kathmandu Valley
425 Doe Library
Indian astrological texts usually have a chapter called "Symptom of Pregnancy." This chapter, however, has nothing to do with human pregnancy but with the conception of Mother Sky. Recent investigation indicates that this concept is closely associated not only with Ajanta ceiling paintings but also with the Buddhist and Hindu festivals, still observed annually in Kathmandu Valley.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Art History, UC Berkeley.
Saturday, November 5, 2005
'Buddhist Relics Redux' Workshop
Seaborg Room, Faculty Club
In the past few decades the study of relic veneration has taken a central place in research on Buddhist history, material culture, and institutions. This spate of interest was spurred, in part, by the groundbreaking studies of relics in medieval Christendom by scholars such as Peter Brown, Caroline Bynum, and Patrick Geary. Following the lead of these medievalists, Buddhologists such as Gregory Schopen and Bernard Faure turned their attention to the phenomena of relics in the Buddhist tradition, producing a number of important studies. In 1994 Kevin Trainor and David Germano started the Relic Veneration Seminar, which met over a four-year period in conjunction with meetings of the American Academy of Religion. A number of participants in that seminar came out with entire monographs devoted to the subject; the volumes include Kevin Trainor's Relics, Ritual, and Representation in Buddhism: Rematerialising the Sri Lankan Theravada Tradition (1997), Brian Ruppert's Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan (2000), and John Strong's Relics of the Buddha (2004). And in 2004 Trainor and Germano published a volume of papers that emerged from the Relic Veneration Seminar, entitled Embodying the Dharma: Buddhist Relic Veneration in Asia. As a result of these monographs and dozens of additional articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia articles, we now possess a wealth of data testifying to the importance of relics in Buddhist history across the Asian continent.
Much of the work done to date has been descriptive in nature, testifying to the centrality of relics in Buddhism. When scholars have strayed beyond description, the analyses have often been Foucauldian in nature; we learn that relics were wielded in the interests of institutional authority, political power, and religious legitimation. Many questions, however, remain unexplored. Why do relics assume such a prominent role in Buddhism in the first place? Is there something distinctively "Buddhist" about the Buddhist treatment of relics? Why are there so many apparent parallels – superficial or otherwise – in Buddhist and Christian relic cults? This workshop will take stock of where we are with respect to our understanding of relics, and where we might go from here.
SCHEDULE
10:00 am Keynote address
Roderick Whitfield (London University): "A Phoenix from the Ashes: The Inextinguishable Power of Chinese Buddhist Relics"
11:30 am Lunch Break
1:00 pm Panel 1: Circumscribing Relics
Chair: Bryan Cuevas (Florida State University)
Panelists:
Phyllis Granoff (Yale University): "Relics, Rubies, and Rituals: Some Comments on the Distinctiveness of the Buddhist Relic Cult."
Koichi Shinohara (Yale University): "The Distinctiveness of Relic Miracle Stories."
Peter Skilling (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, and Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation): "Relics: The Heart of Buddhist Veneration."
Benjamin Bogin (UC Berkeley): "Making Brahman's Flesh in Tibet: The Kyédun Ritual and the Cult of Relics."
Discussant: Duncan Williams (UC Irvine)
3:10 pm Coffee Break
3:30 pm Panel 2: Thinking with Relics
Chair: Jan Nattier (Soka University, Japan)
Justin McDaniel (UC Riverside): "Category Shift: Making New Relics in Bangkok."
James Robson (University of Michigan): "Relic Wary: Facets of Buddhist Relic Veneration in East Asia."
John Strong (Bates College): "What Makes Relics Run."
Discussant: Steven Collins (University of Chicago)
Saturday, October 29, 2005, 11:00 am-5:00 p.m.
Third Berkeley-Stanford Buddhist Studies Graduate Student Colloquium
Slide Ranch (Map and Directions)
DESCRIPTION
This term's Berkeley Stanford Buddhist Studies Graduate Student Colloquium will take place at a particularly beautiful spot directly on the cost (just off Highway 1, a few miles South of Stinson Beach in Marin; see the map and directions). The presentations will be in an isolated "conference yurt" that is located on a bluff overlooking the sea. Outside there are tables and benches where we will serve light refreshments at the start of our gathering at 11 am. After the three presentations (which will be interrupted by a coffee break) there will be more food and drinks. The drive from Berkeley takes 50 minutes, from Stanford 70 minutes, and we suggest participants car-pool.
Space is limited. Please RSVP to Liz Greigg, lgreigg@berkeley.edu, by Tuesday, October 25.
PROGRAM
1: Shari Ruei-Hua Epstein, Stanford
"Decoding the Dao: Revealing the Buddhist Core of the Zhuangzi"
Hanshan Deqing's (1546-1623) Commentary on the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi (ca 1620) was unprecedented in Chinese history. Through this act of exegesis, textual and religious boundaries collapsed as Hanshan reactivated the revered language of this formidable classic to reveal Buddhist rather than Daoist principles. This talk will explore the exegetical techniques that Hanshan employed in his commentary as well as the embedded prophecy that he appealed to in order to justify his interpretation.
2: Wen-shing Lucia Chou, Berkeley
"Fluid Landscape, Timeless Visions, and Truthful Representations: A Sino-Tibetan Remapping of Qing-Dynasty Wutaishan"
The landscape of Wutaishan underwent major transformations during the Qing period (1644-1909), when Manchu emperors patronized temples at Wutaishan with unprecedented vision and fervor. This paper considers the Sino-Tibetan reinvention and representation of Wutaishan by studying a hand-colored woodblock print of Wutaishan carved onsite by a Mongolian lama in 1845. The image is situated at the intersection of several different image-making traditions, each containing its own criterion for truthful representations; examining the particular rhetoric of history and revelations in this image affords us a glimpse into the continuous and dynamic processes of religious and cultural transformation in Chinese sacred geography.
3: Sarah Fremerman Aptilon, Stanford
"Sacred Impersonations: Early Visions of Nyoirin Kannon"
According to legend, Shobo (832-909), founder of the Ono branch of Shingon in Japan, had a vision of Nyoirin Kannon and Juntei Kannon atop Mt. Kasatori that led him to found the temple Daigoji on that site. In his vision, the two Kannon spoke through the goddess Seiry Gongen – or was it the other way around? Early visions of Nyoirin Kannon reveal the way in which the "original substance" (J., honji) of a deity may serve as a mask of Buddhist orthodoxy through which the "manifest trace" (J., suijaku) speaks. This paper explores how various deities merged with and transformed Nyoirin Kannon in Japan.
DIRECTIONS
Cross the Golden Gate Bridge on Highway 101 North. Take the Mt. Tamalpais, Stinson Beach, Highway 1 exit (the exit immediately after the Marin City/Bridgeway exit). Follow the "After Exiting Highway 101" directions below.
From the East Bay:
Get across the Richmond Bridge and travel south on Highway 101. Take the Mt. Tamalpais, Stinson Beach, Highway 1 exit. Follow the "After Exiting Highway 101" directions below.
From Marin County:
Take the Mt. Tamalpais, Stinson Beach, Highway 1 exit from Highway 101. Follow the "After Exiting Highway 101" directions below.
From West Marin:
Go to Stinson Beach, and drive 3.8 miles south on Highway 1. Our driveway is on your righthand side. Look for the Slide Ranch sign. If you get to Muir Beach, you have gone 2 miles too far.
After Exiting Highway 101:
After leaving Highway 101, follow the signs for Highway 1. After about 1/3 mile you will come to a stoplight - turn left at the stoplight; you will now be on Highway 1, a narrow, twisty, and hilly road. After 2.4 miles, you will come to a fork in the road at the top of the hill. Turn left to Stinson Beach, do not turn right towards Muir Woods and Mt. Tamalpais. You will reach Muir Beach and the Pelican Inn after 2.5 miles of steep descent. Drive past the Pelican Inn and follow Highway 1. Just beyond the Pelican Inn, Highway 1 curves to the left, so do not go straight or you will end up in Muir Woods. The green highway sign will tell you to bear left to stay on Highway 1 (towards Stinson Beach). Slide Ranch is 2.2 miles north of Muir Beach. You will see Slide Ranch signs shortly before you reach our driveway on your left. Turn left into our drive.
Spring 2005 Graduate Student Colloquium
Fall 2004 Graduate Student Colloquium
Thursday, October 27, 2005, 5:00 pm
Angela Howard, Department of Art History, Rutgers University
Miracles and Visions Among the Monastic Communities of Kucha, Xinjiang
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
In this presentation, Angela Howard focuses on some aspects of the art and Buddhist teachings of the ancient Kingdom of Kucha, present-day Xinjiang, where monastic communities thrived from 200-650. Monks settled in several locations – Kizil and Kumtura are the largest and best known, but equally important are Simsim, Mazabaha, Kizilkargha, and Taitai'er to name a few. Howard discusses a selected number of unusual images from these sites. They are painted representations of the Shravasti miracle, of the Cosmological Buddha, and of monumental clay sculptures of Buddha. All three are rooted in teachings formulated during the earliest phase of Buddhism. Teachings and images are tightly interconnected. These icons, moreover, are the exclusive outcome of devotional practices in which Kuchean monks engaged.
Angela Howard is Professor of Asian Art, Department of Art History, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. As Special Consultant in Chinese Buddhist art, the Asian Art Department, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, she contributed to the exhibition China – Dawn of a Golden Age (October 2004-January 2005). In addition to numerous articles, Dr. Howard has authored The Imagery of the Cosmological Buddha (1986) and Summit of Treasures, Buddhist Cave Art of Dazu, China (2001). She is the Western editor and collaborator of the volume Chinese Sculpture, a Yale University and Foreign Language Press publication, forthcoming Fall 2005.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005, 3:00-5:00 pm
Edward Tompkins Lecture Series
Vincent Goossaert, Vice-Director, Institute of Sociology of Religions and Secularism, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and David Palmer, Director, Hong Kong EFEO Centre, Chinese University of Hong Kong
How Taoist Masters Engaged with the Modern Spiritual Market: The Case of Peking, 1800-1949 and The Qigong Movement, Taoist Revival, and Nationalism in Post-Mao China
3335 Dwinelle Hall
Wednesday, October 19, 2005, 3:00-5:00 pm
Edward Tompkins Lecture Series
Xun Liu, Assistant Professor, History, Rutgers University
An Immortal in Politics: Abbot Gao Rentong and the Quanzhen Daoist Nexus of Patronage, Power, and Monastic Expansion in Ninteenth Century Beijing
3335 Dwinelle Hall
Wednesday, October 12, 2005, 3:00-5:00 pm
Edward Tompkins Lecture Series
Franciscus Verellen, Director, École française d'Extrême-Orient and Fabrizio Pregadio, Acting Associate Professor, Religious Studies, Stanford University
Disciple of the Three Caverns: Lu Xiujing's renewal of medieval Taoism and Daoist Inner Alchemy and its views of other practices
3335 Dwinelle Hall
Tuesday, October 11, 2005, 12:00 pm
Venerable Master Hsing Yun, Founder, Fo Guang Shan Buddhist Order, Taiwan - Lecture and Calligraphy Exhibit
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Lecture followed by reception.
This exhibit features a wide array of Master Hsing Yun's calligraphy works and other artifacts. The works have been grouped into three categories: encouragement to disciples, blessings to devotees, and Dharma words. Venerable Master Hsing Yun founded Fo Guang Shan Buddhist Order in Taiwan in 1967. He has devoted his time to promoting Dharma propagation through educational, cultural, and charitable endeavors.
The lecture is organized in conjunction with Master Hsing Yun's calligraphy exhibit, which is on display October 11-28, 2005, in the IEAS lobby, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor: Monday through Friday, 9:00 am-5:00 pm.
Thursday, October 6, 2005, 5:00 pm
Peter Skilling, Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation, Thailand
Doxography, History, and Identity: Reflections on 'Theravada Buddhism'
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
'Theravada Buddhism' has become an unquestioned category in modern religious studies, as well as one of the premier options for Buddhist practice in the globalized 'marketplace of religions.' Peter Skilling will examine the origins and significance of the term 'Theravada.' Is the modern usage historically accurate? Have there been alternate designations? Was 'Theravada' the chosen marker of identity for the Buddhist communities of Southeast Asia in the pre-colonial and pre-modern periods? Is it possible that the term flattens the landscape, and lulls us into thinking we know more than we do?
Peter Skilling is the 2005/06 Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the Lumbini International Research Institute (Lumbini, Nepal) and a Special Lecturer at Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok, Thailand). He is founder of the Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation (Bangkok), a project dedicated to the preservation, study and publication of the Buddhist literature of Southeast Asia. He is also a founding member of the International Centre for Buddhist Studies (Bangkok).
Co-sponsored by the Center for Southeast Asia Studies.
Thursday, September 22, 2005, 5:00 pm
Jonathan Silk, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA
What Mahayana Sutras Mean: Thinking about Interpretation and Commentary
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Scholars and students of Buddhism have given much attention to Mahayana sutras, but little to the question of what they may have meant to traditional Indian readers. This talk will explore some questions of the meaning of Mahayana scriptures, how we might determine that meaning, and what to make of the comparative absence of Buddhist scripture commentaries in India.
Jonathan Silk is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on the history and scriptures of Indian Buddhism on the basis of Indian, Tibetan and Chinese literary sources. He is the author of Heart Sutra in Tibetan and the editor of Wisdom, Compassion, and the Search for Understanding: A Buddhist Studies Legacy of Gadjin M. Nagao.
Justin McDaniel speaks about the history of the Burmese in Northern Thailand.
Monday, April 25, 2005, 12:15 - 1:30 pm
Justin McDaniel
Whither a Buddhist Golden Age? The History of the Burmese in Northern Thailand
IEAS conference room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Co-sponsored by the Center for Southeast Asia Studies.
The Burmese invasion of Northern Thailand in the 1550s is often seen as ushering in a period of decline in Buddhism after its Golden Age from 1400-1550. However, manuscripts, inscriptions, and literary evidence suggest that this was not a period of serious decline and, in fact, the teaching of Buddhism survived and in many cases thrived under Burmese rule. Furthermore, it is difficult to label this period particularly Burmese. Justin McDaniel explores the available evidence and suggests new ways of looking at Buddhist history and development in the region from 1550-1893.
Justin McDaniel received his PhD from Harvard University's Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies in 2003. Presently he teaches Buddhism and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Riverside. His research foci include Lao, Thai, Pali and Sanskrit literature, Southeast Asian Buddhism, ritual studies, manuscript studies, and Southeast Asian history.
Friday, April 15, 2005, 2:00 - 5:30 pm
Second Berkeley-Stanford Buddhist Studies Graduate Student Colloquium
followed by reception
Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Avenue, Stanford
Jinah Kim (Berkeley)
From Text to Deity: Understanding the advent of Mahayana female deities in the perspective of book-cult
Nancy Lin (Berkeley)
Narrative Strategies in the Avadana Thangkas of Situ Panchen (1700-1774)
Tad Cook (Stanford)
Pivots of Meaning in the Teaching of the Way: An Introduction to the Daojiao yishu
2004 Graduate Student Colloquium
Thursday, April 14, 2005, 5:00 pm
Dina Bangdel, Ohio State University
Myths, Mandalas, and Monuments: Art of the Newar Buddhist Monasteries of Nepal
425 Doe Library
The Newar Buddhist traditions of Nepal serve as the last remaining legacy of Sanskrit Buddhism, still practiced within the South Asian cultural milieu. Contextualizing the art and ritual practices, Dina Bangdel will discuss the iconography of Newar Buddhist monastic architecture, highlighting the relationship of these visual expressions with the larger Tantric traditions as well as with the local cosmogonic myth of Kathmandu Valley.
Dina Bangdel specializes in South Asian as well as Himalayan Art and is currently the Director of Special Collections at Ohio State University. In fall 2005, she will join the faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University as Associate Professor of South Asian art.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Art History.
Friday, April 8, 2005, 5:00 pm
José Cabezón, Department of Religious Studies, UC Santa Barbara
The Sera Project: Representing a Tibetan Monastery in a Digital Environment
370 Dwinelle Hall
José Cabezón will introduce The Sera Project, an interdisciplinary digital multimedia initiative whose goal it is to document Buddhist monastic life in one of Tibet's great monasteries. Sera Monastery, one of Tibet's premier monastic educational institutions, had close to 10,000 monks before 1959, making it the second largest monastery in the world. What variables of analysis are most relevant to the study of a religious institution like Sera? What difference does digital media make in the envisioning and dissemination of research on an institution like Sera?
José Cabezón is the XIVth Dalai Lama Professor of Tibetan Buddhism and Cultural Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His research interests focus on Tibetan Buddhism, and Buddhism and popular culture. He recently co-edited Identity and the Politics of Scholarship in the Study of Religion. He is the principal investigator for The Sera Project, a joint research initiative between UC Santa Barbara, and the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library. For more information about the project, visit http://www.seramonastery.org
Michael Hahn addresses a question from the audience.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005, 5:00-7:30 p.m.
Michael Hahn, Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley
A Never-ending Story - On the Rediscovery of Buddhist Sanskrit Texts
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton St., 6th Floor
After the demise of Buddhism in the fourteenth century almost the entire body of Buddhist texts was lost in India. However, outside India proper Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts survived in Nepal, Kashmir, Central Asia, Tibet and elsewhere. The process of locating and accessing these manuscripts is by no means completed, and new and exciting discoveries continue to be made. Reconstituting a particular corpus of Buddhist narrative literature, Michael Hahn will illustrate how recent discoveries can make it possible to regain works of seminal importance that have been believed to be irretrievably lost in the Sanskrit original.
Michael Hahn is the current Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. A professor of Indology and Tibetology at Philipps-University in Marburg (Germany), his research interests focus on classical Sanskrit and Buddhist literature, in particular narrative works and didactic and epistolary texts. He is the author of numerous articles and books, among them a primer of the Tibetan language that has been reprinted seven times and is now forthcoming in an English translation.
Buddhist Film Series - Spring 2005
During the spring term 2005 the Center for Buddhist Studies and the Pacific Film Archive co-sponsored "Seeing Through the Screen: Buddhism and Film," a Buddhist film series. Taught by Professor Robert Sharf, director of the Group in Buddhist Studies, "Seeing Through the Screen" focused on Buddhism through film, and film through Buddhism — using the medium of film to explore various themes and issues in the study of Buddhism, and employing ideas culled from Buddhism to reflect back on the nature and power of film. In viewing a wide variety of international and domestic films, the class considered such themes as the Buddhist notion of the "empty self," and the epistemic status of the viewing subject, the role of imagination and visualization in Buddhist meditation, and the role of projection and fantasy in cinematic representations of Buddhism.
"Speaking for the Buddha? Buddhism and the Media" conference - February 8/9, 2005
Sponsored by the Center for Buddhist Studies and the Institute for East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley (with support by Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai America) this conference will bring together scholars, journalists, filmmakers, writers, and professionals from the television, movie, and publishing industries to discuss the media's role in the contemporary transformation of Buddhism.
For more details, please visit:
http://ieas.berkeley.edu/ events/ 2005.02.08-09.html
The conference is organized in conjunction with the International Buddhist Film Festival with screenings in San Francisco (Jan 27-29), Berkeley (Feb 3-13), and San Rafael (February 12-13). For more information, see:
http://www.ibff.org/ index.cfm?pg=N0
Graduate Student Colloquium
On December 3, 2004 the Center for Buddhist Studies hosted a graduate student colloquium featuring talks by three students, Amanda Goodman and Juhn Ahn from Berkeley, and Lisa Ann Grumbach from Stanford. Rather than presenting finished papers, the presenters discussed work in progress, sharing the results of their ongoing research and talking about problems they have encountered. Amanda Goodman shared her research on "Why did Bodhidharma ascend the Vajradhatu? Observations on the 'Chapter on Entrusting the Dharma Repository' (Fu fazang pin) from the Tanfa yize (P3913)," Juhn Ahn spoke about "To Death and Back Again: The Great Death and the Malady of Meditation," and Lisa Ann Grumbach reflected on "Sacrifice and Salvation in Medieval Japan: Hunting and Meat in Religious Practice at Suwa Jinja."
The Buddhist Studies Graduate Colloquium will be held twice a year in order to give graduate students at UC Berkeley and Stanford the opportunity to present their work in an informal setting. This is part of a broader effort to strengthen the cooperation between the Buddhist Studies programs at UC Berkeley and Stanford University.
The next Graduate Student Colloquium will be held on April 15, 2005 at Stanford University.
Berkeley-Stanford Buddhist Studies Colloquium Series
The Berkeley-Stanford Buddhist Studies Colloquium Series continues in the 2004-2005 academic year. For more information, see:
http://www.stanford.edu/ group/ scbs/ Calendar/ 2004-05/ bsbs/ lectures.html