Center for Buddhist Studies 2010-2011 Events
Thursday, May 5, 2011, 5 pm
Kirill Solonin, St. Petersburg State University, Russia
Chinese Buddhism in the Tangut State
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th floor
Since their discovery in the early years of the 20th century, both texts and material objects from Khara-Khoto have been the focus of considerable scholarly attention. Scholars generally agree that Tangut Buddhism evolved from Chinese and Tibetan source traditions; however the exact nature of Chinese and Tibetan influence on Tangut Buddhism remains obscure. In this talk Professor Solonin will present his recent research on the nature of Chinese Buddhist schools in Xixia, focusing on possible Liao influence.
Kirill Solonin holds a doctorate from St. Petersburg State University (Russia), and is currently on the faculty in both St. Petersburg State University and Foguang Buddhist University (Taiwan). His research is connected with the study of Khara-Khoto materials both in Chinese and Tangut. He is the author of Appropriation of the Teaching: Huayan Chan Buddhism in the Tangut State (St.Petersburg: St. Petersburg University Press 2007) and a number of papers.
Thursday, April 28, 2011, 5 pm
Lucia Dolce, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
The Secret Iconography of Empowerment: Triads and Other Ritual Bodies from Mediaeval Japanese material
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th floor
Several ritual exegeses produced in mediaeval Tantric circles are centered on non-canonical icons that visualize segments of the Buddhist practice in anthropomorphic form. Presented as 'exclusive' secret knowledge, these cryptic images were often instrumental to legitimize the existence of competing esoteric lineages. When considered from a broader religio-philosophical perspective, however, they point to a turn in the elaboration of fundamental Tantric ideas, a shift of attention from the complex world of the mandala to the material body of the practitioner. In these exegeses the process of growth of a human embryo is visually deployed as paradigmatic of the production of a perfect body, and the biological characteristics of the human body are emphasized through polar and color-coded glossas, often highlighting the sexual intercourse that starts the reproductive process. Probably because of their sexual overtones, most of the documents that include these images have so far remained unexplored in Japanese temple archives, and regarded as heretical and marginal. Yet the circulation of such imagery across lineages suggests that a specific discourse on the body was formulated and became the main trend of mediaeval Tantric hermeneutics. The talk attempts at reconstructing prominent features of such discourse exploring a number of recently discovered documents./p>
Lucia Dolce is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department of the Study of Religions at SOAS, University of London, where she also directs the Centre for the Study of Japanese Religions. She holds a first degree from the University of Venice (Italy), and a PhD from Leiden University (The Netherlands). Her main research interest is the religiosity of the medieval period. She has published on Nichiren's interpretation of the Lotus Sutra, Tantric Buddhism and the esoterisation of religious practice, kami-Buddhas associative practices, rituals and ritual iconographies.
Thursday, April 14, 2011, 5 pm
José Cabezón, Religious Studies Department, UC Santa Barbara
Sexual Misconduct: The History of a Buddhist Sin
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th floor
This talk explores the history of the doctrine of sexual misconduct in Indian and Tibetan sources. Beginning as a relatively simple injunction against adultery, the doctrine becomes increasingly complex over the centuries. Cabezón will document some of these doctrinal shifts and suggest reasons for Indian Buddhists' greater interest in the "micro-management" of human sexuality, especially after the third century.
José Ignacio Cabezón is Dalai Lama Professor and Chair of the Religious Studies Department at the University of California Santa Barbara. He has published a dozen books and almost fifty articles on Indian and Tibetan Buddhism and on theoretical issues in the study of Religion. His most recent book is an edited volume entitled Tibetan Ritual (Oxford, 2010).
Monday, April 11, 2011, 5:30 pm
Osmund Bopearachchi, Director of Research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)
The Kushans and the Earliest Depictions of Brahmanical Divinities in Gandhāra
Sutardja Dai Hall, Banatao Auditorium
This talk attempts to show the evolution of the earliest iconographic depictions of Brahmanical deities in a Buddhist context from the stage of syncretism to the phase of polarization or codification. When the Kushans were reaching their apogee, cultural interactions with the Hellenistic, Iranian and Indian worlds in these frontier regions gave birth to a progressive Indianisation. The result of these interactions was the emergence of a composite iconography. Having gone through a transitional period, Hindu iconography developed into a codified orthodoxy where textual descriptions were carried out with scrupulous accuracy. Unlike Brahmā and Indra who played a symbolic role in the Buddhist context, the interpretation of the earliest images of divinities like Siva and Vi??u provoked much controversy. Early on, Gandhāran sculptors appear to have enjoyed some independence in the growing cosmopolitan atmosphere created by the politics of the Kushans. It seems that sculptors did not attempt to create images faithful to descriptions in the sacred texts. This transitional period was characterized by composite images and innovative attempts as witnessed by coin types and in plastic art. These efforts are the result of a multitude of interactions taking place in a region where civilizations from diverse horizons merged at the crossroads of Central Asia and Northwest India. These unusual images would eventually give way to the more strictly regulated and codified iconography of later Indian art.
Osmund Bopearachchi is Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research's (C.N.R.S) "Hellenism and Oriental Civilizations" program (UMR 8546/5), and teaches Central Asian and South-Asian archaeology and art history at the Paris IV-Sorbonne University. Prof. Bopearachchi holds a B.A. from the University of Kelaniya (Sri Lanka), a B.A. honors, (M.A.), M.Phil., Ph.D. from the Paris I-Sorbonne University, and a Higher Doctorate from the Paris IV-Sorbonne University. He has published nine books, edited six books, and published 130 articles in international journals.
Thursday, March 10, 2011, 5 pm
Sarah Horton, Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai
Jizō's Many Japanese Faces: Two Apocryphal Sutras and Their Influence
IEAS conference room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th floor
Jizō bodhisattva is everywhere in modern Japan: the edge of town, the street corner, the playground, next to the rice field, and of course in temples. He is the most commonly depicted deity, his images outnumbering those of even Kannon bodhisattva. Jizō has played a central role in Japanese religion since the eleventh century. Closely associated with both life and death, his duties include guarding children at play as well as rescuing living beings who have fallen into hell. Although many aspects of the Japanese forms of Jizō find their origin directly in China, the Enmei Jizō kyō (Longevity Jizō Sutra) and the Jizōbosatsu hosshin in'en jūō kyō (Sutra on the Bodhisattva Jizō's Aspiration for Enlightment and on the Ten Kings), two apocryphal sutras that were produced in Japan around the twelfth century, contain ideas that form the basis for many of the unique features of Jizō worship in Japan today. Such features include the Six Jizōs Pilgrimage that is undertaken every August in Kyoto, the Enmei Jizō statues that are found throughout the country on the grounds of countless temples, and the funereal belief in the thirteen buddhas who care for the deceased. These two sutras successfully granted scriptural authority to nascent Japanese ideas concerning Jizō's multiple and complex roles and laid the groundwork for their future development.
Sarah Horton received her Ph.D. from Yale and has taught at the University of Colorado, Macalester College, and Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Living Buddhist Statues in Early Medieval and Modern Japan, and "Mukaeko, Rehearsals for the Deathbed," in Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism, as well as several scholarly articles. She has conducted research as a visiting scholar at Ryūkoku University and ōtani University in Kyoto, and currently works for the Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai. Her research interests include Tendai Pure Land Buddhism, religion and material culture, and Japanese Buddhist poetry.
Thursday, February 17, 2011, IEAS conference room, 5 pm
Janet Gyatso, Harvard University
Khyentse Lecture
Buddhism, Medicine and the Everyday World: Issues around Religion and Science in Tibetan Intellectual History
2223 Fulton Street, 6th floor
By the 12th century A.D. academically based medical science in Tibet had already developed an intellectual and institutional trajectory that was separate from that of Buddhism, even though it was frequently taught at schools that were part of Buddhist monasteries. Looking at the sites of disjuncture — as well as the overlap — between Buddhist systems of knowledge and those of medicine helps us to appreciate the ways that religion interacted with the everyday world of people in traditional Tibet. While on the one hand medicine posed an epistemic challenge to Buddhism, the relation between the two systems was close enough for it also to serve as the principal example of Buddhist influence in human culture more generally in Tibet. This talk will look closely at several moments in Tibetan history when the two came into conflict, and how such conflicts were resolved.
Janet Gyatso is a specialist in Buddhist studies with concentration on Tibetan and South Asian cultural history. Her books include Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary; In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism; and Women of Tibet. Her current book project is an intellectual history of traditional medical science in Tibet, and raises questions about early modernity and disjunctures between religious and scientific epistemologies. She has also been writing on conceptions of sex and gender in Buddhist monasticism, and on the current female ordination movement in Buddhism. Previous topics of her scholarship have included visionary revelation in Buddhism; issues concerning lineage, memory, and authorship; philosophical questions on the status of experience; and autobiographical writing in Tibet. Gyatso was president of the International Association of Tibetan Studies from 2000 to 2006, and is now co-chair of the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion.
Thursday, February 10, 2011, 5 pm
T. Griffith Foulk, Sarah Lawrence College
"Just Sitting"? Dōgen's Take on Sūtra Reading and Other Conventional Buddhist Practices
IEAS conference room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th floor
Dōgen, founder of the Sōtō School of Zen in Japan, has often been described by modern scholars as a purist who stressed — quoting his teacher Rujing — "just sitting" in meditation, with "no recourse to burning incense prostrations, buddha-mindfulness, repentances, or sutra reading." This statement appears in a number of Dōgen's extant writings, but it is also a fact that his works contain detailed instructions for the very practices that he seems to dismiss as unnecessary. The question is: how to resolve the apparent contradiction in Dōgen 's own stated position on conventional Buddhist practices?
T. Griffith Foulk is Professor of Religion at Sarah Lawrence College and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Soto Zen Text Project
Wednesday, February 2, 2011, 1-5pm
Symposium: Religion and the Arts in Mongolia
International House, Chevron Auditorium
Sponsored by the Center for Buddhist Studies and the Institute of East Asian Studies
Thursday, January 27, 2011, 5 pm
Stefan Baums, Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellow in Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley
Relic Worship in Gandhāra: Nested Boxes, Royal Donors and the Use of Scripture
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th floor
The Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra recounts how, after the final passing of śākyamuni Buddha, the brahman Droṇa distributed his ashes among eight competing kings for installation in eight memorial mounds. Just over one hundred years later, the emperor Aśoka is said to have opened all but one of these mound and distributed the Buddha's relics among eighty-four thousand stūpas all over South Asia. It is likely that the beginnings of Buddhist relic worship in Gandhāra also go back to Aśoka's time, but the earliest inscribed reliquaries enter the archeological record in the second century BCE. They are dedicated by the successive rulers of Gandhāra (Greek, Parthian, Scythian, Kuṣāṇa, and the royal houses of Oḍi and Apraca) as well as by Buddhist monastics themselves. For the next three hundred years, Gandhāra remains a focal point and one of our primary sources for the South Asian practice of relic worship in general, by virtue of the great number of reliquaries that are preserved (often taking the form of nested containers of crystal, precious metals and stone), but especially because the practice of inscribing reliquaries was far more widespread and elaborate in Gandhāra than in the rest of South Asia. Gandhāran Reliquary inscriptions are often dated and record the names of donors and beneficiaries, and the location and school affiliation of the monastic caretakers of the stūpa. In expressing their worship of the buddhas and saints, many of the inscriptions additionally quote scriptural passages, casting valuable light on the spread and use of the Gāndhārī and Sanskrit literature that has been so richly recovered in recent manuscript finds. This lecture investigates the origins and development of relic worship in Gandhāra; discuss the material, textual, and ritual practices associated with the Gandhāran relic cult; and highlight the role and motivations of those who established and maintained the relics of the Buddha.
Stefan Baums studied Indology, Tibetology and Linguistics at the Georg-August-Unversität Göttingen; Sanskrit, Nepali and Buddhist Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; and South Asian and Buddhist Studies at the University of Washington. He received his MA for a stylistic study of Daṇḍin's Daśakumāracarita, and his PhD for the edition and study of a first-century Gāndhārī birch-bark manuscript containing a commentary on a selection of early Buddhist verses. He currently holds the Shinjo Ito Postdoctoral Fellowship in Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches on Buddhist literature in Gāndhārī, Pali and Sanskrit and on the Buddhist cultures of ancient South Asia. His research interests include Buddhist philology and epigraphy, the beginnings of written Buddhist literature, the interaction of written and oral modes of transmission, the development of Buddhist hermeneutics, and the description of Gāndhārī language and literature. His current research focuses on the decipherment of two additional Gāndhārī verse commentaries, and on a comprehensive study of the historical background and exegetical principles of the group of verse commentaries and the related Gāndhārī Saṅgītisūtra commentary. He is co-editor of the Dictionary of Gāndhārī.
Friday, December 3, 2010, 2:30–7 pm
Toshihide Numata Book Award Presentation and Symposium on "Ritual Place"
Toll Room, Alumni House
The winner of the 2010 Toshihide Numata Book Award is Professor James Robson, of Harvard University, for his 2009 book Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue南嶽) in Medieval China (Harvard East Asian Monographs 316, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
2:30–2:45 pm
Introductory Remarks and Book Award Presentation
Rev. Brian Nagata, Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai (Society for the Promotion of Buddhism)
2:45–4:00 pm
Keynote Address and Discussion – Coming Down from the Mountain: The Regionalization and Ritualization of the Divine Thearch of the Southern Sacred Peak [Nanyue shengdi 南嶽聖帝]
James Robson, Harvard University
In the final pages of my Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak in Medieval China, I noted that during the 1970's nearly all traces of religion were erased from Nanyue. During the last 30 years, however, the mountain has once again become a center for Buddhist and Daoist religious practices and a destination for pilgrims. How was the main deity of Nanyue transformed into a popular regional deity named Nanyue Shengdi 南嶽聖帝 [The Divine Thearch of the Southern Sacred Peak]? What kinds of rituals are performed by pilgrims who travel to Nanyue? These are the types of questions I seek to address by considering the development of the cult to Nanyue shengdi within the Buddhist and Daoist history of central Hunan.
James Robson is an Associate Professor of Chinese Buddhism in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He specializes in the history of Medieval Chinese Buddhism and Daoism. In addition to his book Power of Place his publications include Buddhist Monasticism in East Asia: Places of Practice (as coeditor), "Signs of Power: Talismanic Writing in Chinese Buddhism," "Buddhism and the Chinese Marchmount System [Wuyue]: A Case Study of the Southern Marchmount (Mt. Nanyue)," "A Tang Dynasty Chan Mummy [roushen] and a Modern Case of Furta Sacra? Investigating the Contested Bones of Shitou Xiqian," and "Faith in Museums: On the Confluence of Museums and Religious Sites in Asia" (PMLA, 2010). He is presently engaged in a long-term collaborative research project with the École Française d'Extrême-Orient studying a large collection of local religious statuary from Hunan province.
4:15–6:00 pm
Symposium on "Ritual Place"
Chair, Robert Sharf, UC Berkeley
Tracking the Lords of the Earth: Tracing a Subterranean Rite's Movements across Asia
Jacob Dalton, UC Berkeley
From Words to Walls and Back Again: Painted Relic Chambers in Sri Lanka
Phyllis Granoff, Yale University
Dhāraṇīs, Image miracles, and Maṇḍala initiation: Reconstructing Early Esoteric Buddhist Rituals through Chinese Translations
Koichi Shinohara, Yale University
Reflections on the Identity of Deities Among the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley
Alexander von Rospatt, UC Berkeley
Response
James Robson, Harvard University
6:00–7:30 pm
Reception
Thursday, November 18, 2010, 5:00 pm
Jeff Watt, Director and Chief Curator, Himalayan Art Resources
Traditional Tibetan Art: Beyond Iconography and Religion
UC Berkeley Art Museum, Museum Theater, 2625 Durant Avenue (between Bowditch and College)
The study of Tibetan art includes three principal disciplines: (1) Religious Studies, (2) Iconography and (3) Art History. In the field of Tibetan & Himalayan art, when discussing the art itself, it is time to rely less on religious studies scholars, historians, anthropologists, ethnographers and, yes, Tibetologists, and rely more on Art Historians, Art Critics and actual Artists of the past and present. Cultural objects can be religious icons when looked at as religious icons, ritual objects when viewed as ritually related and art objects likewise when viewed as art. The subject of Tibetan religion will still remain the domain of Religious Studies. The study of history will still remain the domain of historians. The obscure field of iconography will still remain the domain of iconographers. None of this will change, but the study of Tibetan art for it to move forward — must change."
Jeff Watt, one of the leading scholars of Himalayan art, acquired his prodigious knowledge of Buddhist, Bon and Hindu iconography from a longtime study of Buddhism and Tantra. He is the Director and Chief Curator of Himalayan Art Resources (HAR), a website and 'virtual museum' featuring more than 35,000 images with detailed descriptions, making it the most comprehensive resource for Himalayan 'style' art and iconography in the world. He has worked on HAR since April 1998 at which time there were only 625 images in total (all Tibetan paintings).
Watt was also the founding Curator and leading scholar at the Rubin Museum of Art (RMA) in New York City, from October 1999 until October 2007. The RMA houses one of the largest collections of Himalayan and Tibetan art in North America which is currently one of the best catalogued collections in the world. The HAR website has been the primary curatorial tool for cataloguing and mounting all exhibitions at the RMA. During his tenure as Senior Curator at the RMA he built the collection from a personal founder driven collection into a world class museum collection with some of the finest examples of Himalayan Art comparable to the best museums in the world.
Friday, November 12, 2010, 5:00 pm
William M. Bodiford, University of California, Los Angeles
Myth and Counter Myth in Early Modern Japan
3335 Dwinelle Hall
Mythology continued to be of vital importance in Japan as late as the 20th century, long after Japan had become one of the world's major industrial and military powers. While mythos presents itself as outside of time, and thus unchanging, within the broad sweep of Japanese history there have existed many alternative mythologies. This lecture will consider two approaches to justifying the divine right to rule: the monk Jōin (1682–1739) marshals Buddhist theories to locate divinity within human history, and the physician Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) reconstructs the language of the gods to relocate divine order at a stage of existence prior the beginning of time. By first considering Jōin's Buddhist arguments we can more easily discern the novelty of the later approach, which today too often escapes critical examination. Together this myth and counter myth also illustrate how the technology of printing not only can reframe myths to give them new power, but in so doing also can help create new texts, new histories, and new identities.
William M. Bodiford is a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he teaches courses on religion in the cultures of Japan and East Asia, and Buddhist Studies. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University. He also studied in Japan at Tsukuba University and Komazawa University. His research spans the medieval, early modern, and contemporary periods of Japanese history. Currently he is investigating religion during the Tokugawa period, especially those aspects of Japanese culture associated with manuscripts, printing, secrecy, education, and proselytizing. Although many of his publications focus on Zen Buddhism (especially Soto Zen), he also researches Tendai and Vinaya Buddhist traditions, Shinto, folklore and popular religions, as well as Japanese martial arts and traditional approaches to health and physical culture.
Thursday, November 4, 5:00 pm
Asuka Sango, Carleton College
The Emperor's Misaie as the Rite of Legitimation and Resistance
IEAS conference room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th floor
This paper examines the Buddhist rite of the Misaie in order to address a paradox of monarchy in Heian Japan (794–1185). In this period, the emperor was the "exemplary center" (as Geertz has termed it) in the centripetal government called "Ritsuryō" state. In order to establish his unparallel leadership, at the beginning of the Heian period, the emperor inaugurated the Buddhist rite of the Misaie in adopting the image of the ideal Buddhist king depicted in the Golden Light Sūtra. It is said that over the course of the Heian period, this monarchical system declined and became a mere puppet regime controlled by influential contenders for political power such as the Fujiwara regent and the retired emperor. However, recent scholarship has revealed that this transition in the structure of governance indicated, not the complete eclipse of the "exemplary center" but a shift from a centripetal government to shared rulership characterized by mutual dependence between competing political leaders including but not limited to the emperor. On the one hand, the emperor altered the format of the Misaie in response to this political shift. On the other hand, the Fujiwara regent and the retired emperor began to appropriate the imperial symbolism enacted in this ritual by sponsoring structurally similar Buddhist rituals. Thus, the Misaie (and rites imitating it) became a rallying point for social agents who sought to bolster their political influence not by overturning the emperor's rule but by mimicking and modifying his liturgy for their own purposes. Their attempts at legitimation in effect allowed the emperor's Misaie to reinvent and further strengthen the imperial authority despite the political shift to shared rulership. This paper casts new light on the indispensable roles that Buddhist rituals played in constructing and contesting political authority, and reveals a paradoxical nature of monarchy in the latter half of the Heian period wherein the centrality of the emperor was perpetuated not only by the emperor himself but also by those who tried to challenge it.
Asuka Sango (Wittenberg University, BA; University of Illinois, MA; Princeton University, PhD) is a specialist in premodern Japanese religions with particular interests in Buddhist rituals in the Heian period (794–1185). She teaches courses in East Asian religions at Carleton College, Minnesota. She is currently writing a book manuscript entitled In the Halo of Golden Light: Imperial Authority and Buddhist Ritual in Heian Japan (794–1185). It examines debate and lecture rituals in which monks discussed the doctrinal knowledge concerning the Golden Light Sūtra, and analyzes how various constituencies of Heian society — Buddhist temples, individual monks, the state, the imperial family, and court nobles — legitimized themselves by claiming the aura of imperial religious authority associated with this sūtra.
Thursday, October 28, 2010, 5:00 pm
Jens-Uwe Hartmann, University of Munich
Between India, Rome and China: Buddhism in Gandhara
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Standing Buddha from Sahri Bahlol (Pakistan),
Private Collection, photo I. Kurita, 1990
It is probable that Buddhism had already reached Gandhāra (an area in presentday northern Pakistan) during the time of King Aśoka in the 3rd century BCE. In the wake of Alexander's campaign to northwest India, this region had absorbed a surge of Greek culture, which remained present for a surprisingly long time. Even centuries later, this culture still served as a matrix for creating visible representations of the Buddha and his followers. These representations proved extremely influential, spreading to India proper and, more importantly, traveling along the Silk Road, initiating the Buddhist art of local cultures and, finally, reaching China and the Far East. So far, Gandhāra has mostly been understood as the name of this specific style of Buddhist art, but recent manuscript finds reveal that the region contributed much more to shaping Buddhism during a formative period than previously thought. It now appears that Gandhāra, earlier considered to be situated at the margin of the Indian Buddhist world, played a decisive role in the spread of Buddhism along the Silk Road towards the east.
Jens-Uwe Hartmann holds the Chair of Indian Studies at the University of Munich. Before his appointment in 1999, he served as professor of Tibetology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Prof. Hartmann was trained in Indology and Tibetology at the University of Munich. In 1978/79, he spent one year in Kathmandu working for the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project. His work focuses on recovering and studying the literature of Indian Buddhism, mostly on the basis of Indian manuscripts and translations.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010, 5:00 pm
Meir Shahar, Tel Aviv University
Oedipal God: The Legend and Cult of Nezha (Nalakūbara)
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Filial piety, we are told, was one of the cornerstones of traditional Chinese civilization. It is striking, therefore, that the Chinese pantheon features a patricidal deity. Celebrated in fiction and drama for over a millennium, the myth of Nezha has its protagonist rebel against paternal authority from the moment of his birth. Culminating in suicide, followed by rebirth and attempted murder, the myth is widely known, and its protagonist commonly worshipped, to this day. Why was Nezha driven to attempted patricide? Which tensions in the Chinese family structure did his myth reflect? How did the legend negotiate these tensions in diverse historical settings? These questions will be briefly addressed from psychological, sociological, and historical perspectives. The speaker will suggest that the oedipal god survived in the Chinese cultural environment by the pretense of filial piety. He will further trace his cult from China back to ancient India, for Nezha was originally an Indian deity named Nalakūbara, whose figure had been likely influenced by that of the great child god Kŗşņa. It is possible, therefore, that two of the greatest Asian story cycles — of the child-god Nezha and of the infant Kŗşņa — are related.
After receiving his undergraduate degree from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Meir Shahar studied Chinese in Taipei. He went on to pursue graduate studies in the U.S. and received a Ph.D in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1992. Professor Shahar has taught at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and is currently Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of East Asian Studies, Tel Aviv University. He is also the director of the Tel Aviv University Confucius Institute. Professor Shahar's research focuses on the interplay of Chinese religion, Chinese literature, and — in his most recent publications — the Chinese martial arts.
Thursday, August 26, 2010, 5:00 pm
Hubert Decleer, School for International Training (SIT) Nepal: Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Program
How Early Tibetan Visitors to Nepal Made Sense of Swayambhu
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Thangka, Swayambhu Stupa
The earliest (1413) extant Tibetan pilgrimage guide to the Swayambhu hill shrine of the Kathmandu Valley names two scriptural sources, (1) the "Prophesy of Mt. Oxhorn in 'the Land of Li,'" for the theme of draining the lake and the Self-born stupa becoming manifest, and (2) the Mañjushrī Root Tantra for the origin of the underground temple of Shāntipur. The explanatory title of the guide refers to the monument as 'Phags pa shing kun,' after an incident in the life of Nāgārjuna: a title which, accordingly, ought to be understood as "Trees (shing) of every (kun) single kind, miraculously produced by the Ārya ('Phags pa') [Nāgārjuna]." Other 'Nāgārjuniana' are referred to in the guide: a ruby that was once part of his mālā (and is now part of a temple treasure in Bhutan), the meditation cave on Mt. Jamacho where he taught buffalo herdsman Shingkhipa Mahāmudrā meditation. No Nepal visit is mentioned in any of the Nāgārjuna biographies. And yet ...
Hubert Decleer received his B.A. in history and European literature from the Regent School in Ghent, Belgium, and his M.A. in oriental philosophy and history from the University of Louvain, where he studied with Étienne Lamotte. He has pursued classical Tibetan and Buddhist studies under a number of tutors in Kathmandu. Mr. Decleer has worked as a fine arts apprentice, art critic, language instructor, and translator and has lectured for the SIT Nepal program. He was the academic director for the Tibetan and Himalayan Studies program from its inception in the fall of 1987 until the spring of 2001.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Second annual Group in Buddhist Studies Fall Hike and Picnic
Muir Beach and Dias Ridge Trail
