2007-2008 Events

2007-2008 Events

Center for Buddhist Studies 2007-2008 Events

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

CBS Silk Road Initiative Lecture and Workshop image

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 RouteReconsidered: Alternative Paths for Early Transmission of Buddhism Beyond the Borderlands of South Asia" in the Bulletin of the Asia Instituteand "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

Politics, Anti-Politics & the 2007 Monks' Protest in Burma image

"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.


Symposium on Literati Buddhism in Middle-Period China image

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

Origin of the Shingon Patriarchal Portraiture — Or, Disjunction between History and Theory image

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. 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


Buddhist Studies Conference and Workshop image

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

The Word of the Buddha or the Disputations of his Disciples? The Buddhist Path as Presented in the Pali Nikāyas image

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 isthe Numata Visiting Professorin Buddhist Studies at UC-Berkeley for Spring 2008. He isReader 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)

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.


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

Religion and the Rise of Printing Reconsidered image

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.

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.


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

Is There Still Buddhism outside Japan? Some Thirteenth-Century Perspectives image

"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

 the Cultivation of a Nation image

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

 Recovering the Ancient Buddhist Texts of Gandhāra image

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 Silk Road and the Sogdians

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

Sankara image

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 Award 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


Text, Translation, and Transmission image

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

 A Note on Mahāvaṃsa 25, 110 image

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 heroDuṭṭhagāmaṇi 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.


 Reflections on Xuanzang's Xiyu-ji (

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.