Numata Center for Buddhist Studies 2022-2023 Events
February 17, 2023
Toshihide Numata Book Award Presentation and Symposium
Sponsor(s): Buddhist Studies, Center for
Award Winner: Professor John Strong (Emeritus Professor, Bates), for his book, The Buddha’s Tooth: Western Tales of a Sri Lankan Relic (University of Chicago Press, 2021).
PROGRAM
2:10 pm - Introductory Remarks and Award Presentation
Robert Sharf, UC Berkeley
George Tanabe, President, BDK America
2:20 pm - Keynote by Award Winner
The Buddha’s Tooth and the Queen’s Shoes: The Story of a Cultural Encounter
John S. Strong, Bates College
3:30 pm - Symposium
Buddha-power as Problem & Opportunity
Anne Blackburn, Cornell University
What’s that British Couple Doing in Jagannath’s Procession? Thoughts on Iconoclasm and Critical Tolerance
Richard Davis, Bard College
Colonial Secular Imaginaries and European Visions of Buddhism in Burma
Alicia Turner, York University
5:30 - Discussion
February 9, 2023
Can Emptiness Be Understood Philosophically?: 2023 Khyentse Lecture
Academic Buddhist philosophy has tended to operate under the assumption that Buddhist ideas about the self and world can be understood and assessed strictly as linguistic propositions, bracketing what the tradition has to say about their psychological appropriation, or about the purported therapeutic results of internalizing those ideas through practice. But is it possible to understand every Buddhist idea divorced from Buddhist psychology and practice? What, if anything, is lost when Buddhist views of mind, language, knowledge, and the self are considered as free-standing conceptual theories divorced from the psychological and therapeutic nexus in which the tradition says they are enmeshed? This lecture considers these questions through the lens of single text, the “Revelations of Mañjuśrī (Lam rim ‘jam dpal zhal lung)”, written by the Fifth Dalai Lama (1617-1682). In its section on emptiness, “Revelations” lays out, in a very clear fashion, the steps that someone must follow to conceptually understand the idea of no-self. Central to this process is the identification of the false sense of self that normally appears to the mind, which, according to the Dalai Lama, requires the practice of certain psychological exercises. These exercises, he states, are a necessary prerequisite to understanding the emptiness of self even at a conceptual level. Can emptiness then be understood philosophically? According to the Fifth Dalai Lama, the answer seems to depend on how capacious our notion of philosophy.
José I. Cabezón is Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, and XIVth Dalai Lama Professor of Tibetan Buddhism and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has publishedeighteen books and many dozens of articles on Buddhism, Tibetan culture, and the academic study of religion. His most recent books include “Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism”, and “Sera Monastery” (with Penpa Dorjee). His current research focuses on the “synoptic” literature of late Indian Buddhism. The recipient of many grants and fellowships, including fellowships from ACLS and the Humboldt, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller foundations, from 2021 to 2022 he was Tsadra Foundation Distinguished Research Scholar. Cabezón was elected to the Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and served as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2020.
October 14, 2022 - October 16, 2022
A Celebration of Buddhist Philology: A Conference in Honor of the Legacy of Yehan Numata and BDK’s Contributions to the Study of Buddhist Texts:
Rev. Dr. Yehan Numata (1897-1994), founder of Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai (Society for the Promotion of Buddhism), is renowned for his efforts to advance the study and understanding of Buddhism around the world. To this end, he established the BDK English Tripitaka Project, with the goal of translating the massive East Asian Buddhist canon into English. He also began a program of endowed Visiting Professorships at universities throughout North America and Europe, the first of which was established at his alma mater, UC Berkeley. This program was originally designed to bring senior Japanese scholars—the undisputed authorities in the study of the East Asian canon—to offer training to Western students of Buddhism. There are now some seventeen Numata Professorships, and while the program has evolved over the years, the focus remains on imparting the philological skills necessary to engage the Buddhist textual tradition.
The field of Buddhist Studies has expanded since the founding of the Numata Professorships and the BDK Tripitaka Project back in the 1980s. Scholars are increasingly drawn to visual, architectural, and ethnographic data to supplement their textual studies. But much work remains to be done on the textual side, and for this philology remains a critical instrument in the scholars’ toolkit. This conference will celebrate the ongoing delights, challenges, conceptual rewards, and frustrations of working with Buddhist texts. Participants are invited to present from their own ongoing work, but also to take this as an opportunity to reflect on the role of philology in the study of Buddhist traditions.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14
2:10-2:45 Welcome and introductory remarks
Robert Sharf (Chair, Numata Center for Buddhist Studies)
George Tanabe (President, BDK America)
Kevin O’Brien (Director, Institute of East Asian Studies)
Michael Iarocci (Associate Dean, Arts and Humanities)
Linda Rugg (Associate Vice Chancellor for Research
Yoshiaki Numata (President, Mitutoyo Corporation)
Harumi Aoki (Executive Director, BDK Japan) presentation of gift
Break
3:00-5:30 Session 1, Panel Chair: Robert Sharf
Birgit Kellner (Austrian Academy of Sciences) - “Bracketing Buddhist Philosophy? On Translating Buddhist Philosophical Texts, Past and Present”
Jonathan Silk (Leiden University) - “What, Why, How and for Whom Do We Translate?”
Collett Cox (University of Washington) - “What is a Text? Encounters with Gāndhārī Manuscripts”
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15
9:30-12:00 Session 2, Panel Chair: Mark Blum
Nobuyoshi Yamabe (Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley) - “The Textual Relationship between the ‘Five Gates’ and the ‘Abridged Essentials’ Reexamined”
Amanda Goodman (University of Toronto) - “Making Modern Editions of Medieval Buddhist Miscellanies: A Case Study in Material Philology”
Timothy H. Barrett (SOAS, University of London) - “Translating Chinese Buddhist Texts in the United Kingdom: History and Prospects”
12:00-2:00 Lunch break
2:00-4:30 Session 3, Panel Chair Alexander von Rospatt
Isabelle Ratié (Sorbonne Nouvelle University) - “Dharmakīrti’s Santānāntarasiddhi: New Sources and Perspectives”
Vincent Tournier (LMU Munich) - “A Re-emerging Canon: Interpreting Recently Identified Fragments of the Saṃmitīya Scriptures”
Charles Hallisey (Harvard Divinity School)- “Contemporary Philology and the Study of “Scripturable Texts” in Pali”
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 16
10:00-12:30 Session 4, Panel Chair: Jacob Dalton
Shen Weirong (Tsinghua University) - (Via Zoom) “Decoding the Tantra Yoga within the Chinese and Tibetan Texts and Contexts of the Mongol-Yuan Period: A Multi-Dimensional Philological Attempt”
James Gentry (Stanford University) - “Why did the Cannibal King Fly? Tantric Transformations of an Indian Narrative in Tibet”
Lucia Dolce (SOAS, University of London) - “Making Sense of Ritual Texts”
October 11, 2022
A Sense of an Ending: Chinese Buddhist Eschatology Reconsidered
Sponsor(s): Chinese Studies, Center for (CCS), History, Department of, Buddhist Studies, Center for, Glorisun Global Network
In the 1970s the Cold War was still in full swing, and many had already confronted its possible conclusion in global nuclear annihilation after experiencing the Cuban missile crisis of 1961. Yet in the Anglophone study of Asia no awareness seemed to exist as to the possibility of reactions to that future that might not be identical to those of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In 1976 however Dan Overmyer published Folk Buddhist Religion, a volume that drew attention to the apocalyptic visions of some popular groups influenced by Buddhist conceptions, amongst others, of global disaster. Since then, more has been written in this vein, and a considerable literature has grown up, including a certain amount concerning reaction in East Asia to climate change. What have we learned over the past five decades?
T.H. Barrett, Emeritus, SOAS, London
April 1, 2022 - April 3, 2022
Buddhism, Physics, and Philosophy Redux
Sponsor(s): Buddhist Studies, Center for, Tianzhu Global Network for the Study of Buddhist Cultures, Glorisun Global Buddhist Network, Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, The Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Foundation
The philosophical problems that emerged with the advent of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century are still very much with us. Issues like the measurement problem, entanglement and nonlocality, wave-particle complementarity, and so on, force us to ask: do the formulations of QM refer to a real, mind-independent world, or are they merely a means of predicting what appears when we go looking? Do concepts like “wave-function,” “particle,” “field,” “time,” and so on reference things that exist in and of themselves, or are they merely nominal or pragmatic constructs? Much has been written on these questions over the last century, yet there is still nothing like consensus on the issues.
Curiously, many analogous philosophical quandaries emerged in Buddhist thought centuries ago, as Buddhist philosophers struggled to understand the relationship between how the world appears and how the world is, as well as the status of our theories about the appearance-reality distinction. Buddhist notions of “dependent origination” (pratītyasamutpāda), and “discriminative construction” (vikalpa), for example, raise issues that are structurally analogous to the problems raised by the measurement problem and wave-particle complementarity, and the competing Buddhist approaches to these problems parallel, in many respects, competing theories in QM.
The early attempts in the 70s to initiate a conversation between Buddhism and theoretical physics are now widely disparaged. The problem, in part, is that the participants in those early conversations, while knowledgeable about QM, often lacked a sophisticated appreciation of Asian and Buddhist philosophy. This workshop will bring together a small group of physicists, philosophers, and scholars of Buddhism to see if it might be possible and fruitful to restart the conversation.
Program
Friday April 1:
1:10-1:15 pm: Welcome and introductory comments
1:15-4:15 pm: Panel 1, Chair: Adam Frank
Carlo Rovelli (Aix-Marseille Université): “The ‘Relational’ Interpretation of Quantum Theory and Nāgārjuna’s Arguments against Independent Existence”
Jay Garfield (Smith College and Harvard Divinity School): “Emptiness and Temporality: What Madhyamaka and Yogācāra Can Tell us About Time and How We Experience It”
Jessica Wilson (University of Toronto): “Quantum and Buddhist Indeterminacy”
4:15-4:30 pm: Break
4:30-6:30 pm: Panel 2, Chair: Francesca Vidotto
Chris Fuchs (University of Massachusetts Boston): “QBism for Buddhism”
Huw Price (University of Bonn): “Time for Pragmatism”
Saturday April 2:
10 am-12 pm: Panel 3, Chair: Jenann Ismael
Michel Bitbol (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique): “Two Dimensions of Interdependence: Relational Quantum Mechanics or QBist Relativity”
Evan Thompson (University of British Columbia): “The Subject of Time.”
12-200 pm: Lunch
2-4 pm: Panel 4, Chair: Jessica Wilson
Robert Sharf (University of California, Berkeley): “On What Physicists Can Learn from Medieval Buddhist Debates over the Nature of Time”
Craig Callender (University of California, San Diego): “The Flowing Self”
4-4:30 pm: Break
4:30-6:30 pm: Panel 5, Chair: Chris Fuchs
Jenann Ismael (Columbia University): “A Participatory Universe in the Realist Mode”
Marcelo Gleiser (Dartmouth College): “Cosmos, Self, Time: A Critical Evaluation”
Sunday April 3:
9:30 am-12:30 pm: Panel 5, Chair: Jay Garfield
Francesca Vidotto (University of Western Ontario): “The Relational Ontology of Contemporary Physics”
Adam Frank (University of Rochester): “The Relative and the Absolute: Buddhist Philosophy, The Boundaries of Physics and the Physics of Boundaries”
John Dunne (University of Wisconsin, Madison): “Empty Explanations”
12:30-1 pm: open discussion and closing remarks, Chair: Robert Sharf