Webcasts
Jacob Dalton, Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley
Rethinking Tibet's Dark Age: Demons, Tantras, and the Formation of Tibetan Buddhism
Inaugural Khyentse Foundation Lecture in Tibetan Buddhism
Tuesday, October 21, 2008, 5:00 pm
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 suggests 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.
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
Thursday, September 27, 2007, 5:00 pm
Responses by UCLA Professors Gregory Schopen and Robert Buswell
In this lecture on the transformation of "Buddhist" nationalism in Ceylon into "ethnic" nationalism and the inspiration provided for these modern events by the epic Mahavaṃsa, Professor Jaini examines the doctrinal implications of the grounds for "absolution" granted by 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 at UC-Berkeley and co-founder of the Group in Buddhist Studies.
Donald Lopez, University of Michigan
What's So Funny About the Laughing Buddha?
Plenary Address for the "Does Humor Belong in Buddhism?" conference
Friday, February 9, 2007, 4:00 pm
In this lecture, Professor Lopez points to some of the themes of a conference designed to explore the role of humor in Buddhism from the 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.
Donald Lopez is Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. His recent books include Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism and The Madman's Middle Way.
Tsering Shakya, University of British Columbia
Tibet: Does History Matter?
Public Lecture from the "Tibetan Religion and State in the 17th and 18th Centuries:
Tibetan, Chinese, and Mongolian Perspectives" conference
Friday, May 5, 2006, 7:00 pm
In this lecture, Professor Shakya compares Tibetan histories — folk and scholarly, religious and secular, Chinese and Tibetan, local and exiled — to examine the process of selective remembering and evaluate how historical accounts reflect and construct different images of Tibet. He concludes that for people whose history is denied, history does indeed matter, because it is intrinsically tied to the formation of individual and national identities, to issues of justice, and to their precarious futures.
Tsering Shakya is Canadian Research Chair in Religion and Contemporary Society in Asia at the University of British Columbia. His primary research interests are the political, cultural, and literary histories of twentieth-century Tibet. His publications include Fire Under the Snow: The Testimony of a Tibetan Prisoner (1997) and The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947 (1999). He also co-edited the first anthology of modern Tibetan short stories and poems, Song of the Snow Lion, New Writings from Tibet (2000) and Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital 1936-1947 (2003).