Author: Mariia Lepneva

Our Spring 2022 Lecture Series highlighted a diverse spectrum of topics related to Buddhism.

March 10: Nan Ouyang (UGent) “Constructing the Divine Abode of Dizang Bodhisattva: Mt. Jiuhua in Late Imperial China”

This talk focuses on the historical transformation of Mt. Jiuhua from a local mountain to a national pilgrimage destination and the ways in which Mt. Jiuhua became the divine abode of Dizang Bodhisattva (Skt. Kṣitigarbha), a savior of the underworld beings in Chinese Buddhism, in the late imperial period (14th–20th centuries). This study explains the making of the sacred mountain by analyzing four salient features of local Jiuhua Buddhism. First, it deals with the cult of mummified bodies by looking into local mortuary practices. Jiuhua Buddhists, choosing not to follow the monastic rules concerning cremation, opted to create a successful tradition of mummy-making for the deceased Buddhists. The continuing emergence of new mummies shaped the perceived sacred atmosphere of Mt. Jiuhua. Second, by analyzing relevant precious scrolls (baojuan), it reveals how vernacular literature functioned as a medium for the localization of Dizang. The performance based on such literature that was carried out at Buddhist events was the key to the further dissemination of the image of Mt. Jiuhua as a sacred mountain. Third, it explores the devotionalpractices of the eminent Buddhist master Ouyi Zhixu (1599–1655) on Mt. Jiuhua during his sojourn, and how the highly charged religious atmosphere of Mt. Jiuhua facilitates Zhixu’s devotion to Dizang. Fourth, it argues that the sacredness of the mountain was constructed and negotiated through pilgrimage practices, evidenced by many material objects used in pilgrimage. In summary, in explicating the uniqueness of Jiuhua Buddhism, this study adopts an interdisciplinary approach that bridges religion and geography and contributes to the study of sacred space in Chinese religion. By challenging the artificial dichotomy between “institutional” and “popular” religion and using understudied local materials, this study provides a different evaluation of the vitality of Ming-Qing Buddhism by focusing on religious practices.

March 17: William Bodiford (UCLA) “Our Dogen: His Birth, Lives, and Afterlives”

Dōgen (1200–1253), a Japanese Buddhist monk, walks amongst us, not just as a citizen of the world or as a Buddhist, but now celebrated as a timeless thinker, philosopher, and literary poet. Thanks to the gift of translation, his words provide people around the world with insights into their own selves, into Asian thought, and into Japanese culture. This remarkably versatile Dōgen first appeared about ninety years ago. My presentation will revisit the circumstances of his birth, trace his transformations and development across multiple fields of thought and literary genres, and conclude with a few reflections on what his multiple lives can tell us about ourselves.

March 24: Lindsey DeWitt Prat (UGent) “The Dharma of Japanese Sumo: Religion, Tradition, and the Female Taboo”

Few icons of Japanese culture are more widely recognized than the sumo wrestler. He sports a loin cloth and a slicked back topknot. His hulking body is aimed to engage. And the sumo wrestler is always a man, in the popular imagination at least. The Japan Sumo Association, a quasi-governmental corporation, champions itself as the custodian of a divine affair cultivated by male deities and mortal men, and exclusive of women. Juxtaposing modern and contemporary sumo literature with historical documents and present-day practices, Dr. DeWitt Prat will peer behind the icon to show how the fantasies surrounding sumo obscure the richness and diversity of its cultural history, a history that includes women.

March 31: Berthe Jansen (Leipzig & Leiden) “What is Buddhist About Law? A View from Early Modern Tibet”

While, within Buddhist Studies, there has been considerable disagreement on the relationship between Buddhism and law, it has been a vastly understudied subject that has fortunately received more academic attention in the past decade. Scholars in the past have equated Buddhist ethics or philosophy with Buddhism tout court. TW Rhys Davids, for example, once remarked that “in the strict sense of the word there is no Buddhist law; there is only an influence exercised by Buddhist ethics on changes that have taken place in customs” (1914: 827). On the other extreme, Rebecca French has positioned for the case of Tibet that “[m]ind training and inner morality are also at the center of the legal system for Tibetan Buddhists” (French 1998: 519) and that “[a]ll laws were understood as religious” (1995: 345). Contemporary scholars of Buddhism and law such as Lammerts and Schonthal attempt to find middle ground, in which Buddhist practice (ie, what Buddhists do), as evidenced either by texts or human conduct, takes center stage. In this talk, I will present a view from early modern Tibet on the complex question of how Buddhism and law intertwine. Using examples from prescriptive legal texts and descriptive legal cases, I will demonstrate in this talk how this entwinement was thought of by Tibetan Buddhists and how this played out in society.

April 21: Charles DiSimone (UGent) “Putting Together a Puzzle Without All the Pieces: Reading Damaged Buddhist Manuscripts”

In the modern world we live in one is presented with a seemingly incalculable number of books to choose from, each and every one a perfect product of precise publication parameters printed on pristine pages. For scholars it is as simple as plucking a well-edited tome off a library shelf or, even easier, pressing one’s finger over a ‘download’ virtual button to have primary source material in its original language or even a well-thought (and sometimes not so well thought) translation. These beautiful editions and translations and the studies that result from them are the products of the gritty work of scholars puzzling over various manuscript materials. This talk is designed as a sort of ‘how it’s made’ instruction and will outline the process of the philological and textual study of Buddhist manuscripts from broken artefacts in the ground to critical editions. Recent manuscript discoveries in Greater Gandhāra will serve as focus point around which the talk will revolve.

April 28: Amy Langenberg (Eckerd College) & Ann Gleig (University of Central Florida) “Did the Buddha Teach Consent?: Buddhist Ethics After Sexual Abuse in Contemporary North American Communities”

Since the 1980s, North American Buddhist communities have been the site of recurring sexual misconduct and abuse allegations. While efforts to bring about justice have been hampered by denial and deflection from teachers, community leaders, and board members, a number of grassroot initiatives have responded more effectively to abuse. Drawing on ethnographic research in multiple North American and transnational Buddhist communities, we identify an emerging Buddhist sexual ethics in these grassroots justice efforts. We will focus, in particular, on three significant responses to abuse: transparency and accountability, sexual consent, and a survivor-centered orientation. We will map each onto classical Buddhist sexual ethics, illuminating areas of disjunction and overlap. Taking our cue from survivor-center advocacy, we argue that, although a Buddhist sexual ethics is locatable in textual traditions or lineage-based teachings, only critical constructive approaches make classical Buddhist sexual ethics useful for just responses to abuse.

May 5: Naomi Appleton (Edinburgh) & Chris Jones (Cambridge) “Three Paths, Two Buddhas and One Vehicle: Disentangling Indian Buddhist Literature”

In the famous Lotus Sūtra parable of the burning house, the father promises his three sons three types of vehicle with which they can play, in order to get them to leave the building. When they get outside, their gifts are identical. As any student of Buddhism knows, the three vehicles represent the three ways to reach liberation in early Buddhism: the bodhisattva path leading to full and perfect buddhahood; the path of the śrāvaka or “hearer”, leading to arhatship; and the vehicle that leads to becoming a pratyekabuddha, an independent or solitary buddha. The one vehicle is, of course, the Mahāyāna or “Great Vehicle”. This parable paints a simple picture of the three vehicles of mainstream Buddhism being supplanted by the all-encompassing Mahāyāna, and this has been much repeated in scholarly literature. This paper, which emerges from a collaborative project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, offers a more complicated assessment of early Buddhist accounts of paths, vehicles and buddhas, with a focus on Indian narrative literature on both sides of the Mahāyāna divide. Was the idea of three paths or vehicles really taken for granted in non-Mahāyāna contexts? And how do Mahāyāna sources make sense of these categories of liberation as they seek to offer new perspectives? By exploring a range of narrative literature that engages these debates, we shed new light on ideas about buddhahood, and on the role of these ideas in the distinction between Mahāyāna and non-Mahāyāna thought.

May 12: Eric Greene (Yale University) “Did Early Chinese Buddhists Understand their Scriptures? – What the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Commentaries Show Us”

In the grand narratives of the transmission of Buddhism to China, only beginning in the early fifth century did Indian Buddhist literature come to be translated into Chinese in a manner both accurate and comprehensible. Though “accurate” is arguably a normative assessment that we might question, there can be no doubt that many pre-fifth-century Chinese translations of Indian Buddhist texts are very difficult to understand and that later Chinese Buddhists on the whole rarely read, studied, or commented on them. As scholars have in recent years analyzed in more detail the texts attributed to key early translators such as Dharmarakṣa 竺法護, Zhi Qian 支謙, and An Shigao 安世高, we have learned much more about the how these early translations worked. Yet while it is now often possible for us, armed with our knowledge of parallel Indic texts, to see how these early translations were intended to work, it is much harder to know how or whether Chinese readers would have made sense of them. In this paper, I will examine whether early Chinese Buddhists were able to understand their scriptures by looking at the very few cases where we have access to (1) a difficult-understand early Chinese translation, (2) a parallel Indic text that allows us to be nearly certain how the translation was intended to work, and (3) an early Chinese commentary that allows us to see how the passages were understood. Such commentaries once existed for a fair number of pre-Kumārajīva Chinese Buddhist scriptures, though only a few survive within the Chinese Buddhist canon. In recent years, a number of new (albeit fragmentary) commentaries to pre-fifth-century translations have come to light from the Dunhuang and Turfan manuscripts. Drawing from these examples, in this talk I will discuss some cases where early Chinese commentaries evidently preserved accurate knowledge of the original Indian texts that had not been included in the translations proper or which had in the translations been rendered in an impossible to understand form. Here, in short, we have evidence for a living interpretive community, presumably one originating in the original translation event itself, that at least sometimes provided a scaffolding that would have made even impossible-to-understand Chinese translations comprehensible.

These lecture series were generously sponsored by the Tianzhu Foundation.

March 9: Anna Andreeva (Uni Heidelberg & Ghent University) “Buddhism and Women’s Health in Medieval Japan”

March 16: Matthew Orsborn (Oxford University) “Monastic Training and Education in Contemporary Taiwanese Buddhism”

Since the middle of the 20th century, Buddhism in the Republic of China has been led by the reformist ‘Humanistic Buddhism’ (Renjian fojiao 人間佛教) movement. One key area of Taixü’s 太虛 program of modernization was that of monastic education and training, centered on Buddhist colleges (Fo xüe yüan 佛學院). However, this proposed ideal system was unable to be actualized during his lifetime in mainland China. His successors in Taiwan, such as Yin Shun 印順, Hsing Yun 星雲 and Sheng Yen 聖嚴, encountered the challenge of a new social, cultural and political climate. Numerous Buddhist colleges were established by various monastic leaders and monasteries, promoting a flourishing of modern Buddhist education. Such institutions were able to maintain a full range of traditional Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhist models of education, drawing from numerous lineages (zōng 宗). Political forces, however, restricted the Ministry of Education from accrediting these colleges and recognizing the degrees and qualifications offered by such institutions. Meanwhile, ‘Buddhist studies’ (Fo xüe 佛學) as an academic discipline began to emerge in recognized Taiwanese universities, influenced first by Japanese and later Western models of scholarship. Many Humanistic Buddhism monastic orders then set up departments and institutes within their own privately-run universities. But they still face a critical dilemma in educating and training their future generations of monastics: Continuation of training monastics in non-recognized Buddhist colleges under their own control, or adoption of degree-granting university Buddhist studies education which must conform to Ministry of Education secular requirements. This paper seeks to examine the responses of the leading educators of Humanistic Buddhism to this quandary at the start of the 21st century.

Key terms: Humanistic Buddhism, Taiwanese Buddhism, Buddhist college, Buddhist studies, Buddhist education

Matthew Orsborn is a Buddhist studies scholar originally from New Zealand. After starting seminary training with the Fo Guang Shan Buddhist order in 2000, he was an ordained monastic for 17 years. During this time he studied for a master’s degree and PhD at the University of Hong Kong, graduating in 2012. His dissertation on inverted parallel structures in the Perfection of Wisdom literature was later published as The Structure and Interpretation of Early Prajñāpāramitā: An Analysis via Chiasmic Theory, and he has several other journal articles on such structures in other Buddhist texts. Working with Pāli, Sanskrit and Chinese literature, Matthew’s other main work is Old School Emptiness: Hermeneutics, Criticism and Tradition in the Narrative of Śūnyatā, which challenges the standard narrative of emptiness in Indian Buddhism. Along with such writings on Indian Buddhist texts and doctrines, Matthew’s many years of experience in contemporary Chinese/Taiwanese Buddhist traditions has inspired him to recently turn his research attention in this direction. This includes a planned forthcoming series of articles on Chinese Buddhist monastic ordination, education, and the lived experience of monastic life. He has taught Buddhist studies in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Australia and Thailand, and is presently at the Institute for Oriental Studies at Oxford University in the UK.

March 23: Lewis Doney (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) “Incantations and Empire: A study of some Tibetan dhāraṇī texts from Dunhuang”

From the late eighth century to the middle of the ninth century, the Tibetan empire (circa 600–850) held and administered Dunhuang in what is now Northwest China. From the 820s to the 840s, several copies of texts within the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā) genre and thousands of copies of an incantation (dhāraṇī ) text called the Aparimitāyur-nāma mahāyāna-sūtra were commissioned as a gift for the Tibetan emperor. Copies of the latter were made in scriptoria in eastern Tibet and Dunhuang and eventually stored in Mogao Cave 17, becoming one of the most represented works within that treasure-trove of manuscripts. As embodiments of a number of buddhas and their teachings, copying and thus spreading the incantation and surrounding sūtra generated merit for the emperor and his realm, his saṃgha and his subjects. The copying project as a whole was supported by taxation and by levies of paper, and so participated in both an employment and ritual economy in which the principles of royal giving and karmic merit dynamically interacted with legal codes, corporal punishment and a posssible “black market” in scripture copies. This talk will contextualise this imperial sūtra copying project and the effect of the Tibetan empire on the Dunhuang Buddhist community that it reveals. Also, by briefly touching on Uṣniṣavjijaya-dhāraṇī texts and some other manuscripts from the same Mogao corpus, it will question to what extent the Aparimitāyur-nāma mahāyāna-sūtra contained the most popular incantation practised around Dunhuang at this time.

Lewis Doney specialises in Tibetan and religious studies and is currently on the BuddhistRoad project at Ruhr-University Bochum. He received his PhD from SOAS, University of London (2011) and has since researched early Tibetan kingship and religion, their connections with South Asia and their impact on Sino-Tibetan communities around Dunhuang and later southern Tibetan Buddhist historiography and ritual. His publications include a monograph, The Zangs gling ma: The First Padmasambhava Biography (International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, 2014) and an edited volume, Bringing Buddhism to Tibet: History and Narrative in the Dba’ bzhed Manuscript (De Gruyter, 2021).

March 30: Matthew Milligan (Trinity University) “Economic Class in Early South Asian Buddhism: Perspectives from Epigraphy and the Divyāvadāna”

To date, most studies of classical South Asian Buddhist demographics have focused on varṇa and conversion, mercantile professions, and, more recently, finally, on gender. Unfortunately, even when scholars have turned their gaze onto demographics they have primarily relied upon anachronistic and generalized readings of literature and/or century old tabulations of inscriptions. As far as I can tell, there have been no attempts to critically examine economic class through close readings of texts and historical documents together. In this paper, I will evaluate the definition of “economic class,” decouple it from classical Sanskrit concepts of idealized varṇa, and introduce some new data from texts and inscriptions to examine the lived realities of “class” from approximately 300 BCE until at least the 5th c. CE when the Divyāvadāna was composed.

Matthew D. Milligan is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. He is also a Harwood Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He works on the intersections of Buddhism, Economics, and Philology and has published numerous articles on the economic history of Buddhism in South Asia. In addition to forthcoming articles in the Journal of Contemporary Religion and South Asian Studies, he is completing a book manuscript titled Of Rags and Riches: The Disruptive Business of Early Buddhism. His latest project involves decolonizing the field of engaged Buddhist Economics in the United States.

April 20: Lina Verchery (University of Otago) cancelled  “The Personal and the Planetary: Cosmological Thought and the Moral Imagination in Everyday Chinese Buddhist Monastic Life”

Drawing on years of ethnographic research with the Chinese Buddhist monastic organization Fajie Fojiao Zonghui 法界佛教總會, known in English as the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association, this talk explores how Buddhist cosmological thought trains the moral imagination in everyday Buddhist monastic life. Situating contemporary Chinese Buddhism as a decidedly global phenomenon, this talk challenges the simplistic categories of “modernism” versus “traditionalism” to instead highlight how very ancient Buddhist ideas about cosmology present resources for reflecting on contemporary questions of immediate concern, including the intensifying climate crisis and our uncertain planetary future.

Lina Verchery is Lecturer in Religion at the University of Otago in New Zealand, where she teaches courses on Buddhism and Asian Religions. Her doctoral dissertation in Buddhist Studies from Harvard University, Impersonal Intimacy: Relational Ethics and Self-Cultivation in a Transnational Chinese Buddhist Monastic Network, is an ethnographic study of sociality, interspecies ethics, and moral cultivation in the Fajie Fojiao Zonghui, a transnational Chinese Buddhist monastic organization. Lina is also an award-winning filmmaker and has produced several documentary and multimedia works as part of her ethnographic research. Prior to joining the University of Otago, she was Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian Religions at Union College.

April 30: Pei-ying Lin (Fu Jen Catholic University) “On the Materiality and Cultural Identity of the Tang Dynasty: East Asian Buddhist Networks behind a Royal Portrait” (this lecture is kindly sponsored by the National Taiwan Library)

May 4: Serena Saccone (Istituto Universitario Orientale, Napoli & IKGA, ÖAW) “One Flew Over the Nest: an Externalist Among Pramāṇavādins”

May 11: Ingo Strauch (University of Lausanne) “Newly discovered Śāradā documents from a private collection in the UK”

These lecture series were generously sponsored by the Tianzhu Foundation.