Center for Buddhist Studies 2016-2017 Events
Tuesday, May 2, 2017, 5 pm
Buddhist Sectarianism in Burma’s Last Kingdom
Alexandra Kaloyanides, Ho Center for Buddhist Studies, Stanford University
180 Doe Memorial Library
"The Shwe Dagon Pagoda, Rangoon,"
chromolithograph, from Burma
by Albert Fytche, 1878
The collapse of Burma’s final kingdom was devastating for the Buddhist organizations that depended on its royal sponsorship. The nineteenth-century encroachment of the British Raj crippled both the Konbaung Dynasty and its once-powerful monastic establishment, but it also created opportunities for opposition parties. One adversarial Buddhist sect, the Paramats, was particularly active between the Second Anglo-Burmese War in 1852 and the total colonization of the country in 1886. This reformist sect has been something of a mystery in the study of Burmese Buddhism because of minimal references to them in official Burmese materials. This paper examines a previously unstudied collection of documents dating from 1830–1880 found in an American missionary archive to argue that the Paramats were not a kind of Mahayanist group dedicated to propounding emptiness teachings, as scholars have argued, but rather, they were a Burmese Buddhist organization concerned with protesting laxity within mainstream monasteries and excess at royally-sponsored shrines. These archival documents suggest that scholars should attend to politics, as well as philosophy, to understand this particular sectarian development and similar religious reform movements at the end of the Konbaung Dynasty.
Alexandra Kaloyanides is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford University. She researches Burmese religions and American religious history. Her book manuscript, "Objects of Conversion, Relics of Resistance," examines the religious contestations, conversions, and transformations during the nineteenth-century American Baptist mission to Burma.
Thursday, April 20, 2017, 5 pm
The Logic of Zen Kōans
T. Griffith Foulk, Sarah Lawrence College
180 Doe Memorial Library
The idea that kōans are "logically insoluble riddles" (Arthur Koestler) that are designed to "break down all reasoning" (Erik Zürcher) and thereby induce satori is commonplace, both in the academic literature that treats Zen Buddhism and in the imagination of many Western Zen practitioners. The so-called "Zen of contemplating sayings" (kanna zen 看話禪) that evolved in Japan and Korea on the basis of the teachings of Chan master Dahui Zonggao (1089-1163) is the main source of that idea, for proponents of the practice speak of cutting off all intellectual interpretation and concentrating the mind in a "great ball of doubt" as the prerequisite for a sudden awakening. Even in that branch of the Chan / Zen / Sŏn tradition, however, the test of awakening is the ability to comment appropriately on kōans, showing that one gets the point and understands the meaning of each particular "old case." Foulk argues that kōan literature in general is grounded in the Mahāyāna doctrines of "emptiness" and "two truths," and that the sayings of individual Zen masters found therein do, in fact, embody a certain logic. Nonsensical statements that have no reasonable connection to the topic under discussion are no more tolerated in the Zen tradition than in any other area of human discourse.
T. Griffith Foulk is Professor of Religion at Sarah Lawrence College and Co-editor-in-chief of the Sōtō Zen Text Project.
Wednesday, April 19, 2017, 5 pm
Buddhist Studies/Art History Lecture
Through the Eyes of Another: Visions of Arhats in Song-Dynasty China
Phillip E. Bloom, Indiana University Bloomington
308A Doe Memorial Library
Crafted between 1178 and 1188 for ritual use in a small temple near Ningbo, the one hundred hanging scrolls of the Five Hundred Arhats (Daitokuji, Kyoto, Japan) possess a striking peculiarity: more often than not, the set’s eponymous semi-divine monks are simply shown gazing. They gaze at natural wonders, they gaze at supernatural feats performed by their peers, they gaze at episodes from the mytho-history of Buddhism, and most importantly, they gaze even at paintings. How are we to understand these scrolls’ insistence on acts of viewing, and how might Song worshippers have responded? Through their practice of gazing, do these arhats merely model for us how we ought to look, or are other motivations at work? To make sense of the multiple forms of spectatorial engagement facilitated by these scrolls, this presentation will bring them into dialogue with contemporaneous poems that describe imaginative acts of entering painted worlds and with liturgies that prescribe the performative inhabitation of other subject positions. Drawing on such texts, I shall argue that the Five Hundred Arhats and other works of Song Buddhist art seek to create possibilities for intersubjective experience—for viewing the world through the eyes of an awakened other.
Phillip E. Bloom is Assistant Professor of East Asian Art History in the Department of Art History at Indiana University, Bloomington. He specializes in the history of Song-dynasty Buddhist art and ritual. His work has recently appeared in The Art Bulletin and Bukkyō geijutsu, and he is currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled "Nebulous Intersections: Ritual and Representation in Chinese Buddhist Art, ca. 1178."
Friday, April 14, 2017, 3-5 pm
Saving Mes Aynak: Filmscreening and Discussion
Speaker: Brent E. Huffman (Northwestern University)
Moderator: Sanjyot Mehendale (UC Berkeley)
160 Kroeber Hall
Co-sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Center for Buddhist Studies at UC Berkeley
The 2015 documentary Saving Mes Aynak follows Afghan archaeologist Qadir Temori as he tries to save a 5,000-yearold site in Afghanistan from imminent demolition by a Chinese state-owned mining company that is eager to harvest $100 billion worth of copper buried directly beneath the archaeological ruins. The Chinese project directly threatens future discoveries that, according to some, could help redefine not only the history of Afghanistan but even the history of Buddhism itself. The documentary highlights Qadir Temori and his fellow Afghan archaeologists’ overwhelmingly difficult battle against the Chinese company, the Taliban, and local political groups to save this cultural heritage from likely erasure.
Following the screening, there will be a conversation with Brent E. Huffman to discuss the aftermath of the documentary and the current state of the site.
Brent E. Huffman is an award-winning director, producer and cinematographer of documentaries and television programs. His work ranges from documentaries aired on The Discovery Channel, The National Geographic Channel, NBC, CNN, PBS and Al Jazeera, to Sundance Film Festival premieres, to ethnographic films made for the China Exploration and Research Society. He has also directed, produced, shot, and edited short documentaries for online outlets like The New York Times, TIME, Salon, Huffington Post and PBS Arts.
Huffman has been making social issue documentaries and environmental films for more than a decade in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. These films have gone on to win numerous awards including a Primetime Emmy, Best Conservation Film-Jackson Hole, Best Documentary-Fresno, three Cine Golden Eagle Awards, a College Emmy, a Student Academy Award, and a Grand Jury Award at AFI’s SILVERDOCS.
Brent Huffman is also an associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University where he teaches documentary production and theory.
Saturday-Monday, March 25-27, 2017
Workshop on Tannishō Commentarial Materials
Jodo Shinshu Center, 2140 Durant Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94704
Sponsors: Center for Japanese Studies, Center for Buddhist Studies, Otani University, Ryukoku University
The Centers for Japanese Studies and Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, together with Ōtani University and Ryūkoku University in Kyoto announce a workshop under the supervision of Mark Blum that will focus on critically examining premodern and modern hermeneutics of the Tannishō, a core text of the Shin sect of Buddhism, and arguably the most well-read religious text in postwar Japan. Beginning in 2017, the workshop will continue for five years, meeting twice a year for 3 to 4 days each time, in late March in Berkeley and early August in Kyoto, where it will be hosted alternately by Ōtani and Ryūkoku universities. Organized around close readings of the most influential materials produced in early modern, modern, and postmodern Japan, the workshop aims at producing a critical, annotated translation detailing the salient ways in which this text has been both inspirational and controversial, as well as a series of essays analyzing a wide spectrum of voices in Japanese scholarship and preaching that have spoken on this work. For the early modern or Edo period, the commentaries by Enchi (1662), Jinrei (1801-1808), and Ryōshō (1841) will be examined. For the modern period, works by Andō Shūichi (1909), Chikazumi Jōkan (1930), and Soga Ryōjin (1947) will be the major concern. And for the postwar/postmodern period, due to the sheer volume of publications (over 300 titles), reading choices will be selected at a later date in consultation with participants.
Click here for more information.
Event Contact: cjs-events@berkeley.edu, 510‑642‑3415
Thursday, March 23, 2017, 5 pm
Buddhist Studies/Art History Lecture
Female Bodily Sacrifice and the Absence of Men: Filial Figuration in Song, Jin, and Liao Tombs
Winston Kyan, University of Utah
308A Doe Memorial Library
Among the pantheon of filial offspring in China, a striking if overlooked figure is the wife of Wang Wuzi, or Wang Wuzi Qi 王武子妻, who offers her flesh to cure her sick mother-in-law through an act of filial thigh cutting, or gegu 割股. While the paradox of gegu as being both an act of filial caring towards one’s parents and an act of unfilial neglect towards the parental gift of the body has attracted the attention of scholars both medieval and modern, a close analysis of its figural representation remains to be done. Images of Wang Wuzi Qi are particularly intriguing since they appear across a variety of funerary media from Song, Jin, and Liao period tombs, ranging across painted murals, engraved stone slabs, painted carved bricks, carved low relief tiles, and three-dimensional tableaux of clay figurines. However, these diverse images are limited by established pictorial conventions, geographic locations in southern Shanxi and northern Henan provinces, and chronological parameters from the late eleventh- to early thirteenth-centuries. Moreover, the pictorial standardization of a controversial filial sacrifice within the hallowed filial space of the tomb raises key issues regarding the construction of a "new" filial paragon, the relationship between Buddhist caves and ancestral tombs, as well as the connection between filial efficacy as a popular belief and an elite value.
Winston Kyan was born in Rangoon, Burma. He holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and an MA and PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago. He has taught at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where he is currently Assistant Professor of Art History. His current and primary research project is rethinking the intersection of filial piety and Buddhist art in medieval China through representations of the body, sacrifice, and health as a sensorium of sight, smells, sounds, tastes, touch, and other modes of perception beyond the usual five. He is wrapping up a manuscript on this topic while continuing side interests in the relationship between contemporary Asian art and Buddhism as well as Asian American visual culture as sites of religious identity. His next research project will explore the visual and material culture of the trade and military routes between Yunnan, China and Myanmar/Burma. His publications have appeared in The Art Bulletin, Amerasia Journal, and Art Journal Open, in addition to other conference volumes and digital resources.
Tuesday, March 21, 2017, 4 pm
Queuing into the Afterlife: The Politics of Branding Buryat Buddhism
Mongolia Initiative/Buddhist Studies
Tatiana Chudakova, Tufts University
180 Doe Library
This paper discusses the inadvertent effects of transforming the marked into the marketable on the mundane strategies of "making a living," both economically and cosmologically, in Buddhist Siberia. Building on anthropological discussions on marketing ethnicity, it tracks attempts to develop a regional brand in Buryatia, a self-governing republic within the Russian Federation that derives its political status from being home to an ethnically Mongol minority. Tracking local efforts to develop "Buryatia’s brand," I am interested in what happens when local ethno-branding projects run up against and must make themselves legible to the state’s narratives and imaginaries of its national and international identity. In the context of present day Russia examined here, branding ethnicity is a complicated political gambit, in part because the state’s self-presentation has been fluctuating between privileging radical plurality on the one hand and, on the other, laying claims to equally radical cultural and ideological homogeneity. By looking at an instance of ethno-branding "at the edges" — in a region that has historically been situated at the periphery of several, competing spheres of political influence, the paper interrogates how the regimes of value that underpin ethno-branding work alongside a self-conscious politics of marginality.
Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510‑642‑2809
Friday, March 3, 2017, 7:30-9:00 pm — CANCELLED
Why does the Dalai Lama say he is "Son of Nālandā": Prof. Robert Thurman delivers the inaugural ISAS-VSB Lecture on Religion in the Modern World
Robert Thurman, Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies, Department of Religion, Columbia University; President, Tibet House U.S., President of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies
Moderator: Jake Dalton, Khyentse Professor and Chair, Dept. of South and Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley
Sibley Auditorium, Bechtel Engineering Center
Sponsors: Institute for South Asia Studies, Vedanta Society Berkeley, Center for Buddhist Studies, Sarah Kailath Chair of India Studies, Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies, Himalayan Studies Program
For more information, please visit the following website: http://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/csas.html?event_ID=1061....
Thursday, March 2, 2017, 5 pm
Buddhist Studies/Art History Lecture
Buddhist Maṇḍalas and Narratives of Enlightenment
Michelle C. Wang, Georgetown University
308A Doe Memorial Library
Five Buddhas crown, MG. 17781,
Guiyijun Period (848-1036), second
half of tenth century, ink and color
on paper, 28.7 x 54 cm., originally
from Dunhuang, now in the
Musée Guimet
Throughout the twentieth century, scholarly and popular interpretations of Buddhist maṇḍalas emphasized their status as expressions of the human psyche. By virtue of their circular form, they were considered to represent the wholeness of the self. Shifting the discourse from one focused upon the human subject to one that instead places the Buddha’s experience at the forefront, this talk analyzes eighth to tenth century Buddhist maṇḍalas from Dunhuang (Gansu Province, China) as embodiments of the Buddha’s own awakening, in particular narratives of enlightenment that emerged within the context of esoteric Buddhism. Furthermore, the mapping of Buddhist maṇḍalas onto the architectural space of cave shrines at Dunhuang underscores the subjective nature of vision that was key not only to the performative restaging of the Buddha’s awakening, but also of the transformation from bodhisattva to Buddhahood.
Michelle C. Wang is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Georgetown University. She is a specialist in the Buddhist visual culture of medieval China, in particular, mural and portable paintings from Silk Road sites. She has authored articles on changing conceptions of maṇḍalas in Tang China and paired images in Buddhist art, and recently completed a book manuscript titled Maṇḍalas in the Making: The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang. Her research has been supported by grants from the Asian Cultural Council, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the Association for Asian Studies.
Thursday, February 23, 2017, 5 pm
The Wheel of Time: Tibetan Thoughts on the Buddha’s Anno Nirvanae
2017 Khyentse Lecture
Leonard van der Kuijp, Harvard University
Toll Room, Alumni House
UC Berkeley
Although fairly long in coming, the Christian calendar began with the year in which Jesus was allegedly born. And Dionysius Exiguus (6thc.) was the first to introduce the notion of A[nno]D[omini], the birth year of the Christ. Famously, the British monk Bede (672‑735) went so far as to deduce in his De temporum ratione of 725, an elaboration of his earlier Liber de temporibus of 703, that 3,952 years had passed from creation to Jesus' birth. For good measure he also recalculated the date of Easter. Perhaps more notoriously, in 1650, Archbishop James Ussher (1581‑1656) calculated that the world had come into being on October 23, 4004 BCE! The great Jewish intellectual Moses Maimonides (1135‑1204) worked with the year of the creation of the world, the Aera Mundi, as his starting point. In his opinion, the world's creation fell on the first of the seventh lunar month [September 7], 3760 BCE, and he used this calculation to date his 1166‑78 treatise, the Sanctification of the New Moon.
The Buddhists were not so much concerned with the creation of the world — for them it was not — as they generally were with the year in which the Buddha entered nirvana, the year in which he passed away. As yet unpublished and titled Elimination of Errors in Computation 1442 or 1443, Gö Lotsawa Zhönupel's (1392‑1481) polemical work on chronology and computation is a crucially important source for our understanding of the different ways in which the calendars and the various calculations of the passage of time in general developed in Tibet. It is also especially significant for the insights it provides into the numerous attempts that had been made in Tibetan intellectual circles to calculate the chronology of the life of the Buddha and the year of his passing. My talk will focus on this aspect of Gö Lotsawa's work and its place in Tibetan intellectual history
Leonard van der Kuijp is professor of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies and chairs the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies. Best known for his studies of Buddhist epistemology, he is the author of numerous works on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. Recent publications include An Early Tibetan Survey of Buddhist Literature (Vol. 64, Harvard Oriental Series, 2008), coauthored with Kurtis R. Schaeffer, and In Search of Dharma: Indian and Ceylonese Travelers in Fifteenth Century Tibet (Wisdom, 2009). Van der Kuijp’s research focuses primarily on the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist thought, Tibetan Buddhist intellectual history, Tibetan Buddhism, and premodern Sino-Tibetan and Tibeto-Mongol political and religious relations
Friday–Sunday, February 17–19, 2017
Conference
Bodhisattva Precepts in East Asian Perspective and Beyond
Friday (4–6:30 pm): 180 Doe Memorial Library
Saturday (9:30 am–6 pm) – Sunday (9 am–12:00 pm): Alumni House
UC Berkeley
Program
Panel 1 (Friday, February 17, 4–6:30pm): China I
Chair: Peiying Lin (UC Berkeley)
T. H. Barrett (SOAS, University of London) — How did Chinese Lay People Perceive the Bodhisattva Precepts?
Liying Kuo (Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient) — Visions and the Reception of Bodhisattva Precepts in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries
Charles Muller (Tokyo University) — The Silla Monk Daehyeon and his Commentary on the Sutra of Brahmā's Net
Panel 2 (Saturday, February 18, 9:30am–noon): China II
Chair: Raoul Birnbaum (UC Santa Cruz)
Sangyop Lee (Stanford University) — The Youposai wujie weiyi jing Bodhisattva Pratimokṣa: Its Nature and Historical Significance
Ann Heirman (University of Gent) — Body Movement and Sport Activities in Bodhisattva Precepts: A Normative Perspective from India to China
Ester Bianchi (Università degli Studi di Perugia) — Bodhisattva Precepts in Modern China. An Overview and Evaluation
Panel 3 (Saturday, February 18, 2–3:45pm) China and Japan
Chair: Robert Sharf (UC Berkeley)
Peiying Lin (UC Berkeley/ Fu Jen Catholic University) — Bodhidharma Lineages and Bodhisattva Precepts in the Ninth Century
Paul Groner (University of Virginia) — Annen’s 安然 Comprehensive Commentary on the Universal Bodhisattva Ordination (Futsū jubosatsukai kōshaku 普通授菩薩戒広釈): Its Background and Later Influence
Panel 4 (Saturday, February 18, 4:15–7pm) Japan
Chair: Mark Blum (UC Berkeley)
Dermott Joseph Walsh (UCLA) — Eisai and the Bodhisattva Precepts
Richard Jaffe (Duke University) — Kawaguchi Ekai’s View of the Precepts for Buddhism in the Twentieth-Century
William Bodiford (UCLA) — Anraku Ritsu in Tokugawa Japan: The Reconfiguration of the Bodhisattva Precepts within Japanese Tendai Buddhism
Panel 5 (Sunday, February 19, 9am–noon) India and Tibet
Chair: Jake Dalton (UC Berkeley)
Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (Independent scholar) — "Compassionate Killing" Revisited
Alex von Rospatt (UC Berkeley) — The Adikarma literature. The vows and daily practices of lay bodhisattvas in late Indian Buddhism
Hiromi Habata (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität) — Did the Bodhisattva-vinaya Exist? The Situation of the Bodhisattva Precepts in India before the Systematization
Click here to view the abstracts.
Friday-Sunday, November 4–6, 2016
Conference
Conceptuality and Non-Conceptuality in Buddhist Thought
Center for Buddhist Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Locations: Friday, November 4: 1995 University, 5th floor, IEAS Conference Room
Saturday-Sunday, November 5-6: 370 Dwinelle Hall
This conference will explore the different ways that Buddhist scholastic traditions (Sarvāstivāda, Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, Pramāṇavāda) engaged with the issue of "conceptuality" and "non-conceptuality" in their analyses of mind, perception, thinking, and insight. In exploring this topic, participants are invited to focus on one or more key terms or notions, such as saṃjñā, manovijñāna, manas, vitarka/vicāra, manojalpa, prajñapti, and pratyakṣa, as well as pairs like vikalpaversus nirvikalpa (or avikalpaka), svalakṣaṇa versus sāmānyalakṣaṇa, dravya-svalakṣaṇa versus āyatana-svalakṣaṇa, and so on. Finally, participants are encouraged to address the relevance of these notions in the light of contemporary philosophical discussions of conceptual and non-conceptual perception and experience.
Schedule
Friday, November 4, 2016
1995 University, 5th floor, IEAS Conference Room
Panel 1 — 4 to 7 pm: Conceptuality and Experience
Chair: Robert Sharf (UC Berkeley)
Dan Arnold (University of Chicago): "Perception and the Perceptible: Candrakīrti on the Difference an Adjective Makes"
Evan Thompson (University of British Columbia): "What's in a Concept? Conceptualizing the Conceptual in Buddhist Philosophy and Cognitive Science"
Sonam Kachru (University of Virginia): "Who's Afraid of Non-Conceptual Content? Rehabilitating Dignāga's Criterion for what is Perceptually Evident"
Saturday, November 5, 2016
370 Dwinelle Hall
Panel 2 — 9 to noon: Yogācāra
Chair: Alexander von Rospatt (UC Berkeley)
Nobuyoshi Yamabe (Waseda University): "The Position of Conceptualization in the Context of the Yogācāra Bīja Theory"
Jowita Kramer (Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich): "Conceptuality in Yogācāra Thought"
Roy Tzohar (Tel Aviv University): "Enjoy the Silence: The Relation between Non-Conceptual Awareness and Inexpressibility According to Some Yogācāra Sources"
Panel 3 — 2 to 4: Sūtra and Abhidharma
Chair: Collett Cox (University of Washington)
Qian Lin (UC Berkeley): "The Mahānidāna-sūtra and Conceptual Thinking in Early Buddhism"
Ching Keng (National Chengchi University, Taiwan): "Does the Cognition of Blueness-cum-Yellowness Involve Vikalpa?"
Panel 4 — 4:30 to 6:30: The Ultimate and the Epistemic Role of Experience
Chair: Sara L. McClintock (Emory University)
Jonardon Ganeri (New York University): "Mindedness, Saññā, and the Epistemic Role of Experience"
Jay Garfield (Smith College): "Thinking Beyond Thought: Tsongkhapa and Mipham on the Conceptualized Ultimate"
Sunday, November 6, 2016
370 Dwinelle Hall
Panel 5 — 9 am to noon: Pramāṇavāda
Chair: Jowita Kramer (Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich)
Patrick McAllister (Austrian Academy of Sciences): "A Buddhist Account of the Simultaneity of Perceptual and Conceptual Awareness Events"
Vincent Eltschinger (École Pratique des Hautes Études): "Dharmakīrti, Apoha, and the Two Truths"
Toru Funayama (Kyoto University): "Non-Conceptuality through Repetition of Conceptual Meditation: Kamalaśīla's Theory of Yogic Perception"
Download the abstracts here.
Friday, October 28, 2016, 3 - 6:30 pm
2016 Toshihide Numata Book Award Presentation and Symposium
Toll Room, Alumni House, UC Berkeley
Buddhist Bodies, Medical Bodies, Human Bodies
A symposium in celebration of this year's award winner Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet by Janet Gyatso.
3:10-3:15 Introductory remarks
Robert Sharf (University of California, Berkeley)
3:15-3:20 Award Presentation
George Tanabe (Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai)
3:20-4:15 Keynote
"Categories, Mentalities, Individuals: Historiography in a Buddhological Vein"
Janet Gyatso (Harvard Divinity School)
4:15-4:30 Break
4:30-6:30 Symposium
Chair: Robert Sharf (University of California, Berkeley)
Discussants: Janet Gyatso (Harvard Divinity School) and Jacob Dalton (University of California, Berkeley)
"Bodies, Biologies, and the Anthropology of Tibetan Medicine"
Vincanne Adams (University of California, San Francisco)
"Empirical Bodies in Science and Buddhism"
Evan Thompson (University of British Columbia)
"Teaching the View vs. Teaching the Methods: Medical Pedagogy at the Fifth Dalai Lama’s Court"
Stacey Van Vleet (University of California, Berkeley)
Thursday, October 6, 2016, 5 pm
Khmer Śaivism
Alexis Sanderson, Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College, University of Oxford
180 Doe Memorial Library, UC Berkeley
Of Śaivism, Pāñcarātrika Vaiṣṇavism and Mahāyāna Buddhism, the three Indic religions that flourished among the ruling and priestly élites of the Khmers up to the 14th century Śaivism was predominant. Indian Śaivism was not static or homogeneous, and Khmer Śaivism reflects some of this diversity and development over time. This talk will consider evidence among the Khmers for Śaivas of the Atimārga and Mantramārga, as well as the lay Śivadharma. It will also engage with the granting of Saiddhāntika Śaiva initiation to the Khmer monarch, as well as evidence that the Khmer version of Indian Śaivism includes elements that appear to have no Indian prototypes.
Alexis Sanderson was Lecturer in Sanskrit in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College from 1977 to 1992. From 1992 to 2015 he occupied the Chair of Eastern Religions and Ethics in the same university, and as the holder of that post became a Fellow of All Souls College. His field is early medieval religion in India and Southeast Asia, focusing on the history of Śaivism, its relations with the state, and its influence on Buddhism and Vaishnavism.
Thursday - Friday, September 29–30, 2016
Thunder from the Steppes: New Perspectives on the Mongol Empire
Conference/Symposium
180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative
Thursday, September 29, 4pm - 6 pm Keynote Address
Friday, September 30, 9 am - 6 pm
The Mongol Empire orients history between Asia and Europe, ancient and modern, rural and urban, settled and nomadic, scientific and faith-based, and soteriological and aristocratic worlds. This conference invites new research on the Mongol empire in an effort to re-situate and re-evaluate the study and the significance of the Mongol empire in a global context. Organized by the UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative.
Speakers include:
• Reuven Amitai, Hebrew University of Jeruselem
• Christopher Atwood, University of Pennsylvania
• Brian Baumann, UC Berkeley
• Dashdondog Bayarsaikhan, National University of Mongolia
• Michal Biran, Hebrew University of Jeruselem
• Bettine Birge, University of Southern California
• Nicola Di Cosmo, Institute for Advanced Study
• Johan Elverskog, Southern Methodist University
• Matthew Mosca, University of Washington
• Roxann Prazniak, University of Oregon
• Morris Rossabi, Columbia University
• Uranchimeg Tsultem, UC Berkeley
• Leonard Van Der Kuijp, Harvard University
Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510‑642‑2809
Tuesday, September 13, 2016, 5 pm
Failed Missions: Early 20th Century Searches for Sanskrit Manuscripts in Tibet
Birgit Kellner, Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia, Austrian Academy of Sciences
180 Doe Memorial Library
First page of ms of Kamalaśīla’s 3rd
Bhāvanākrama. The manuscript was given
to Agvan Dorzhiev by the 13th Dalai Lama,
and ended up in the Asiatic Museum of the
Academy of Sciences in Leningrad.
(E. Obermiller in Journal of the Greater
India Society, 2/1, January 1935). It was
published in facsimile in Moscow in 1963.1
In the late 19th century, scholarly interest in Sanskrit manuscripts as sources of authority on ancient India gradually came to expand to Tibet. Information that such manuscripts might be found in the land of snows transpired from reports of travelers in pursuit of knowledge on Indian literature as well as Buddhism, notably the Bengali scholar Sarat Chandra Das and the Japanese monk Ekai Kawaguchi. More or less simultaneously with the large expeditions to Central Asia led by Stein, Pelliot and Grünwedel/Le Coq, several attempts were made to organize search missions in order to catalogue Sanskrit manuscripts in Tibet — by Emil Schlagintweit from Prussia and Theodor Stcherbatsky from Russia. British Orientalists also requested that the Younghusband mission to Tibet should “collect” Tibetan literature as well as Sanskrit materials for their libraries. What do these ultimately failed missions — and the specific ways in which they have been reported and represented — tell us about the status of Sanskrit manuscripts in the early 20th century, especially of those that were suspected in Tibet?
Thursday, September 8, 2016, 5 pm
Rise of Neo-Buddhist Visual Culture: Assertion, Alternative, and Difference
Y.S. Alone, Visual Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
10 Stephens Hall, ISAS Conference Room, UC Berkeley
The term "Neo-Buddhism" is associated with the Buddhist population that were converted under the dynamic leadership of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. Dr. Ambedkar was the first person in the twentieth century India to offer a constructive critic of Imperial, Brahmanical, and Marxian discourses. The recent interest in the neo-Buddhist visual culture has focused on "how dalits express" themselves, however, the quest of the Ambedkarite movement has always been to create alternative and non-confined spaces for articulation, spaces and cultures that are expressive of the Neo-Buddhist community, aimed at changing the powers imbedded in forms of articulation. Dr. Ambedkar was himself very conscious of choosing certain forms from the ancient Buddhist tradition to create a distinct cultural identity. After his demise, there was an upsurge of the visual culture that has redefined the cultural identity in opposition to the Brahmanical cultural nationalism. Buddha viharas, statues, calendars, and many more objects have the markers of cultural assertion as a part of the social, political and democratization of society. This lecture will illustrate the rise of the Neo-Buddhist visual and material cultures, drawing examples from Maharashtra and other parts of India, along with the examples of gallery art practices, as the basis of a constructive critic of the nomenclature "subaltern" in the paradigm of discursive realm in relation to Dalit community.
Dr. Y.S. Alone is Professor in Visual Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and has written on Ancient Indian Art, critic of Walter Spink, Buddhist caves, modern Indian art, Neo-Buddhist Visual culture, Dr. Ambedkar's critical frame work, he is engaged in conceptual formulation of "protected ignorance." He was nominated as ICCR chair visiting Professor in Shenzhen University, China. He has been engaged in popular lectures as part of social movement, his recently published book — Early Western Indian Buddhist Caves: Forms and Patronage, Kaveri Books, New Delhi, 2016.
Sponsors: Institute for South Asia Studies, Department of History of Art, The Asian Art and Visual Cultures working group at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley, Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies, Catherine and William L. Magistretti Chair in South and Southeast Asian Studies
Event made possible with the support of the Sarah Kailath Chair of India Studies
Sunday, August 28, 2016
2016 Annual Buddhist Studies Hike
Marin Headlands, California
