Author: Mariia Lepneva

This year’s spring lecture series of the Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies feature a combination of Permanent Training in Buddhist Studies (PTBS) lecture series and Gandhāra Corpora Lecture Series. The lectures take place onsite in Campus Boekentoren of Ghent University and online (registration via the link).

Program

17 March 2025 – DharmaNexus as a Multilingual Graph of Buddhist Intertextuality: Design Choices, Research Uses, and Future Applications

• by Sebastian Nehrdich (Tohoku University)

Locating textual parallels, translations, citations, and topically related passages across vast collections of texts in multiple languages is a basic requirement of philological work in Buddhist Studies. Recent advances in digitization, OCR, and cross-lingual information retrieval have fundamentally changed access to this kind of evidence, with far-reaching implications for how philological research can be conducted. A central component in this context is DharmaNexus: a database that stores intertextual relationships between passages across languages and sources, and that supports the retrieval and comparison functions used in the Dharmamitra tool ecosystem.

In this presentation, I will discuss DharmaNexus as a verifiable “evidence layer” for AI-assisted multilingual research. I will highlight key design choices and show how intertextual relationships are determined and represented. I will also demonstrate how this data is already used in research-facing tools for discovering and inspecting parallels and reuse patterns in Buddhist literature. Finally, I will address limitations and risks that can arise from over-reliance on these systems, and outline further possible research applications enabled by this architecture.

26 March 2025 –.Exegetical Diagrams as Scholastic Tools: Text-Image Dynamics, Production, Use, and Networks in Dunhuang

• by Xiaoming Hou (Ghent University)

Exegetical diagrams in Chinese Buddhism—whose use flourished during this period and continues to this day—are designated both as fenmen tu 分門圖 (“gate-division diagrams”) and kewen 科文 (“texts of analytical division”). This dual terminology reveals the liminal nature of this genre, which stands at the intersection of textual reasoning and visual representation. In this talk, I focus on a group of closely related Dunhuang manuscripts often labeled Tiantai fenmen tu 天台分門圖 (“Gate-Division Diagrams of the Tiantai School”). These manuscripts, which contain diagrams at various stages of completion, provide crucial evidence for understanding their connection to the commentarial literature, the editorial procedures of their production, and their intended use in the context of monastic education.

By analyzing these materials, I show how exegetical diagrams mediated the complex interplay between text and image, the schematic and the discursive, and the oral and the written, through techniques of classification, synthesis, and visualization. This approach sheds new light on the mechanisms through which intellectual knowledge was transmitted, practiced, and reconfigured in medieval Buddhist scholasticism. Finally, the talk reviews evidence linking these Tiantai exegetical diagrams to the intellectual circle of Facheng 法成 (Chos grub, d. ca. 864), the influential Sino-Tibetan translator and exegete active in Dunhuang during the first half of the ninth century. This connection situates the diagrams within local scholastic networks and underscores their role in broader cross-cultural exchanges of knowledge and technique.

2 April 2026 – Revisiting the Bodhisattva Maitreya in Gandhāran Art

• by Christian Luczanits (SOAS, University of London)

In my presentation, I will return to a topic that has interested me since my student days, namely the depictions and roles of the Bodhisattva and future Buddha Maitreya in Gandhāran art. I have covered some aspects of this topic in previous work, in particular in my contribution on narrative reliefs with a flask-holding Bodhisattva to the 2005 volume of East and West dedicated to Maurizio Taddei, and since have an unfinished monograph on the subject on my virtual desk. This time, I will revisit my earlier ideas on the subject in light of more recent publications. Among other topics, I will consider the origin of Maitreya, his designation as Buddha in early inscriptions, the concepts of Maitreya’s paradises, Ketumatī and Tuṣita, as potential precursors of Pure Land Buddhism, and Maitreya as a Bodhisattva representing the brahmanic caste.

22 April 2026 – The Contours of Paradise: Pleasure Gardens and Figurations of the Self in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three

• by Prof. Daniel Stuart (University of South Carolina/ Uni Hamburg)

This presentation introduces newly edited Sanskrit material from a manuscript of the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthāna. This text contains the most extensive surviving Sanskrit account of Buddhist cosmology. Likely composed in Greater Gandhāra in the fourth century CE, it presents a visionary narrative in which a Buddhist yogic practitioner experiences the five realms of the cosmos: the human realm, hell beings, hungry ghosts, animals, and deities. Focusing on descriptions of the heavenly realms within the sphere of sensual desire, this talk explores how these depictions relate to broader developments in Buddhist thought. In particular, it examines the relationship between traditional cosmological models, emerging scholastic taxonomies, visionary yogic practice, and conceptions of the interpenetration of phenomena that became central to major strands of Mahāyāna philosophy.

30 April 2026 – New archaeological data on the extension of the Kushan empire and post-Kushan groups in the Himalayan range

• by Samara Broglia de Moura (Eveha International, Archéologie et Sciences de l’Antiquité (ArScAn), Centre de Recherche sur les Civilisations de l’Asie Orientale (CRCAO))

During the first millennium CE, part of the Western Himalayas was subjected to a dynamic of exchange and interaction similar to those that affected a large part of Central Asia and North India during the expansion of the Hellenistic empire up to the post-Kushan groups (3rd century BCE to 8th century CE). The aim of this presentation is to provide new archaeological data collected in Ladakh (North India), particularly in the Dras valley, in order to better understand the mechanism of expansion, the control apparatus, and the circulation roads of these different Central Asian groups in the Himalayas.

In order to detail these dynamics, we first aim to present new ceramic and architectural data from two sites in the Dras Valley (Goshan Khar and Rgyalmo Khar) and one site in the Nubra Valley (Deskit Thingang). We will then carry out an intra-regional analysis with other contemporaneous sites in Ladakh, with the aim of understanding the different stages of expansion of these central Asian groups, the organization of the territory and the routes that linked all those sites. Finally, we will provide a macro-regional view of Ladakh’s connections with its neighbours during the Kushan and post-Kushan periods.

7 May 2026 – Poet’s Myths: Asuras in Aśvaghoṣa’s Epics

• by Alex Meng (Leiden University)

Asuras have long been depicted as primordial antagonistic beings in the religious, mythological, and folkloric traditions of South Asia. Buddhism engaged with these figures early on and regarded Asuras as warlike demons perpetually in conflict with the gods. This gave rise to the Deva-Asura war (devāsurasaṃgrāma) motif, which persisted throughout the history of Buddhist literature. This talk focuses on how Aśvaghoṣa, the well-known Buddhist poet, presents the Asuras in his epics, the Buddhacarita and Saundarananda, at the beginning of the first millennium CE. Through close readings of four sets of verses from these two works, we attempt to discern the strategies and approaches by which early Indian Buddhists appropriated, localized, and “domesticated” the figure of the Asura and the motif of the Deva-Asura war. This further serves as a cultural, epistemic, and intellectual backdrop for the development of the Buddhist cosmological traditions and the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra, of which the Asuras and the Deva-Asura war are inevitable components.