Category: Guest lectures

We are excited to announce the fourth lecture in our ongoing “Gandhāra Corpora Project Lecture Series,” featuring Professor Jessie Pons (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) and other esteemed guests! The Gandhāra Corpora Project Lecture Series is organized by Prof. Charles DiSimone, leader of the ERC-funded project “Corpora in Greater Gandhāra: Tracing the development of Buddhist textuality and Gilgit/Bamiyan manuscript networks in the first millennium CE” at the Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies.

Title: Sustaining Digital Heritage Beyond Funding: Building on the DiGA Project

Speakers: Prof. Jessie Pons (CERES, Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

&co.:
Serena Autiero (Thammasat University, Bangkok), Frederik Elwert (CERES, Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Cristiano Moscatelli (Independent Researcher), Abdul Samad (KPDOAM)

Time: Nov 20, 2025 @ 17.00 CET

Location: Faculteitszaal, Blandijn
faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte
Blandijnberg 2
9000 Gent

All are welcome. The Gandhāra Corpora Lecture Series is in-person and hybrid online. Please register for the series through this Google Form.

Abstract:
From 2021 to 2024, the DiGA project (“Digitization of Gandharan Artefacts: A project for the preservation and study of the Buddhist art from Pakistan”) documented a collection of approximately 1,500 Gandharan sculptures preserved at the Dir Museum in Chakdara, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province (KP), Pakistan. These sculptures originated from a dozen archaeological sites in the Shah-kot/Talash zone (around present-day Chakdara), excavated by the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums, KP, and the Department of Archaeology at Peshawar University in the 1960s and 1970s. As one of the few Gandharan sculptural corpora with established archaeological provenance, this collection provides a solid foundation for reassessing key questions in Gandhara studies, particularly regarding the history of Buddhism on the right bank of Swat River. The database of the collection is now available on the heidICON platform, ready to lend itself to exciting research avenues.

With the project officially coming to an end, however, new questions emerge: how can such a project remain active and relevant beyond its institutional and financial framework? How can its data continue to be curated, enriched, and mobilized for research and public engagement once the funding period ends? This presentation will report some of the project’s activities in the post-funding phase. It will share results from recent research based on the DiGA corpus, sketch the outline of a research program building on the project’s legacy, and discuss ongoing initiatives with KPDOAM on community engagement. Ultimately, this talk invites reflection on the broader question of how digital heritage projects can evolve sustainably once their formal lifecycle has ended.

Bios:
Jessie Pons (CERES, Ruhr-Universität Bochum):
Jessie Pons is Professor for the History of South Asian Religions at the Center for Religions Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Trained as an art historian, Jessie Pons explores how religion and art intersect and how material objects shape religious communication, lived experiences, and scholarly interpretation.

Serena Autiero (Thammasat University, Bangkok):
Serena Autiero is an archaeologist and material culture historian. She is currently a researcher at Thammasat University. Her research interests include cultural exchange in Afroeurasia in pre-modern times, globalization studies, and a special focus on the Indian Ocean World. She authored several publications in international journals and co-edited Globalization and Transculturality from Antiquity to the Pre-Modern World for Routledge.

Frederik Elwert (CERES, Ruhr-Universität Bochum):
Frederik Elwert is associate professor at the Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr University Bochum. His background is in religious studies and sociology. He has applied digital humanities methodologies in different areas of the study of religions.

Cristiano Moscatelli (Independent Researcher):
Cristiano Moscatelli specialises in Gandharan studies. His research interests focus on Buddhist visual and material culture and on the interactions between Buddhism and local religious systems in the ancient north-western Indian subcontinent. In addition to his work with DiGA, he was a research fellow with the eartHeritage project – A cultural rescue initiative for earthen heritage, investigating clay and stucco Buddhist sculpture from Central Asia through the development of a digital database for the collection, preservation, and dissemination of archaeological data.

Abdul Samad (KPDOAM):
Abdul Samad is Secretary of Tourism, Culture, Archaeology and Museums, Government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Pakistan as well as Director General of Archaeology & Museums KP. He has two decades of experience in South Asian archaeology, history, and culture, extensively exploring Pakistan’s rich heritage, focusing particularly on the Gandhara and Kalash civilizations. As the Director of the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, he has led numerous initiatives to preserve and promote the cultural legacy of KP through national and international Projects.

We are delighted to announce that the fourth lecture in our ongoing “Gandhāra Corpora Project Lecture Series” will be delivered by Keiki Nakayama from the University of Leipzig. The lecture series is organized by Prof. Charles DiSimone, leader of the ERC-funded project “Corpora in Greater Gandhāra: Tracing the development of Buddhist textuality and Gilgit/Bamiyan manuscript networks in the first millennium CE” at the Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies.

“Resituating the Yogācārabhūmi Corpus: Potential Gandhāran Links and Sūtra-Grounded Practice”

Keiki Nakayama, University of Leipzig

Nov 13, 2025 @ 17.00 CET

Location: Faculteitszaal, Blandijn
faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte
Blandijnberg 2
9000 Gent

To attend remotely, please register through this Google Form.

Abstract:
The Yogācāra school, together with the Madhyamaka, is well known as one of the two major streams of Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism. Yet its foundational text, the Yogācārabhūmi, contains numerous passages that follow the modes of description characteristic of the Śrāvakayāna tradition. The author(s) of this work are thought to have belonged to a lineage that transmitted the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya. Thus, while the Yogācārins were moving away from the Sarvāstivāda mainstream, they also inherited many of its scholastic and disciplinary elements.
The first part of this presentation reconsiders the position of the Yogācārabhūmi—and hence early Yogācāra—in relation to the Sarvāstivāda tradition. The Yogācāra school appears to have shared doctrinal affinities with internal Sarvāstivādin groups such as the Dārṣṭāntikas and Vibhajyavādins mentioned in the Mahāvibhāṣā. Focusing on the Gandhāra region, I examine evidence suggesting that the “Western Masters” (Pāścāttyas), associated with Gandhāra, held positions that coincide with those of the Yogācārabhūmi, thereby indicating possible intersections between Yogācāra and Gandhāran Buddhism.
Later but related materials include numerous Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya manuscripts discovered in Gilgit, part of Greater Gandhāra. These texts notably embed a variety of sūtras. If the sūtras employed in the Yogācārabhūmi correspond to those appeared in the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya, this strengthens the view that the Yogācārabhūmi originated from a tradition closely linked to the transmitters of the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya. The recently studied Dīrghāgama (Long Discourses) manuscripts from Gilgit also deserve attention.
The latter half of the talk examines how the Yogācārabhūmi actively incorporates and reinterprets sūtras within its structure of practice. Focusing on the Śrāvakabhūmi, the earliest stratum of the text, I argue that the Yogācāra school, though renowned as meditative practitioners, grounded their practice in close engagement with the words of the Buddha.

Bio
Keiki Nakayama is a guest researcher and lecturer at the Institute for South and Central Asian Studies, Leipzig University. Having recently fulfilled the requirements for a PhD at Kyoto University, he is currently conducting research on the interpretation of canonical scriptures within the Yogācāra school, supported since 2023 by the Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai (BDK). His publications include a co-authored article with Jens-Uwe Hartmann, “One Hundred and Eight Distinctions of Craving: The Tṛṣṇā-sūtra of the Saṃyuktāgama,” in Mind, Text, and Reality in Buddhist Studies: Engaging the Scholarship of Rupert Gethin (Bloomsbury, 2025), and a co-authored monograph with Izumi Miyazaki et al., The Seventy-five Elements (Dharma) in the Madhyamakapañca-skandhaka, in Bauddhakośa: A Treasury of Buddhist Terms and Illustrative Sentences, Volume VIII (The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 2022).

We are pleased to announce an upcoming lecture by Dr. Nishimura Akira (Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Tokyo), who has been a visiting scholar with us over the past two months. Dr. Nishimura’s talk will explore the complex intersections of war memorialization, repatriation of human remains, and the pivotal role played by temple communities in these processes—an issue of particular relevance to scholars of Buddhism and religion. He will also address the responsibilities and ethical engagement of religious scholars in such sensitive contemporary debates. The lecture will take place on Thursday, 23 October at 16:30 in the Faculty Room. All are warmly invited to attend.

We are thrilled to share that the third lecture in our ongoing “Gandhāra Corpora Project Lecture Series” will be delivered by Dr. Stefan Baums from the University of Munich! The lecture series is organized by Prof. Charles DiSimone, leader of the ERC-funded project “Corpora in Greater Gandhāra: Tracing the development of Buddhist textuality and Gilgit/Bamiyan manuscript networks in the first millennium CE” at the Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies.

Title: GĀNDHĀRĪ MANUSCRIPTS AND INSCRIPTIONS: MAINTAINING AND ANALYZING A COMPREHENSIVE CORPUS

Speaker: Stefan Baums, University of Munich

Timing: Wednesday, June 18, 2025 @17.00

Location: Faculteitszaal, Blandijn faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte (Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent) In-person and ONLINE

All are welcome. Please register for the series through this Google Form: https://forms.gle/TwffQCPuVipUpMvk6

Abstract:

Gandhāra is known not only for its unique material culture, representing a confluence of Hellenistic and South Asian elements, but also for the wealth of ancient inscriptions and manuscripts in the local Gāndhārī language and Kharoṣṭhī script that it produced and preserved for us. Many of the inscriptions are from Buddhist contexts, including a large number of donative records, and some contain valuable historical information about the population and rulers of Gandhāra through history. Most ancient manuscripts from Gandhāra have come to light only in the last thirty years, and are the subject of intense ongoing research. They are the oldest Buddhist and the oldest South Asian manuscripts preserved, and very close to the beginning of written literature in South Asia. Beyond Gandhāra itself, Gāndharī manuscripts and inscriptions were produced far into the Indian subcontinent, up to Bamiyan in the west, in the kingdoms of Khotan, Krorayina, and Kucha along the Silk Roads, and among expatriate Buddhist communities in China. The Gāndhārī documentary corpus thus tells the story of the export of a writing culture, of its texts, and of the ideas that they conveyed across large parts of Asia, and is of unique interest for the historiography of Buddhism and Asian civilization. It is also a very diverse corpus, produced over more than five hundred years, comprising many different document types, and written in a broad range of scribal hands, orthographies, and dialects ranging from Middle Indian to Sanskrit. Beginning in 2002, Andrew Glass and the present speaker have been compiling a text-image corpus of all Gāndhārī documents on the website Gandhari.org, currently numbering 2,858 items and continually updated. In addition to presenting the documents in both their material and textual aspects, they catalog and analyze them in various ways, including the a dictionary of the Gāndhārī language, currently numbering 10,125 articles and firmly establishing Gāndhārī as one of the major languages of Buddhism and modern Buddhist scholarship. This lecture will introduce the corpus of Gāndhārī documents from Gandhāra and beyond, discuss the particular challenges that their study individually and as a whole presents, the solutions that have been adopted, and some discoveries made along the way.

Bio:

Stefan Baums teaches at the Institute for Indology and Tibetology of the University of Munich and serves as lead researcher of the Buddhist Manuscripts from Gandhāra project at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Before joining the University of Munich, he held positions at the University of Copenhagen, the University of Washington, the University of California, Berkeley, and Leiden University. His research interests include Buddhist philology and epigraphy, classical Sanskrit court literature, the development of Buddhist hermeneutics, and the description of Gāndhārī language and literature. His current work focuses on the decipherment and edition of four Gāndhārī manuscripts containing commentaries on early Buddhist verses and the Saṃgītisūtra and a study of the historical connections and exegetical principles of this group of texts. He is editor of the Dictionary of Gāndhārī, co-editor of the Gandhāran Buddhist Texts series, academic lead of the Research Environment for Ancient Documents (READ) software development project, and epigraphist for the Italian Archeological Mission in Pakistan.

We are excited to announce the second lecture in our ongoing “Gandhāra Corpora Project Lecture Series”, featuring Prof. Lewis Doney from the University of Bonn! The lecture series is organized by Prof. Charles DiSimone, leader of the ERC-funded project “Corpora in Greater Gandhāra: Tracing the development of Buddhist textuality and Gilgit/Bamiyan manuscript networks in the first millennium CE” at the Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies.

Title: A Corpus of Ritual Literature from Dunhuang and its Links Further West

Speaker: Lewis Doney, University of Bonn

Timing: Tuesday, June 10, 2025 @17.00

Location: Faculteitszaal, Blandijn faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte (Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent)

In-person and ONLINE

All are welcome. Please register for the series through this Google Form: https://forms.gle/TwffQCPuVipUpMvk6 

Abstract:

The wealth of texts from the famous “Library Cave” or Cave 17 from Mogao near Dunhuang, which was closed around the turn of the eleventh century, offers scholars a time-capsule from the social and cultural world of first-millennium CE Dunhuang, a melting pot with connections to China and places farther west along the so-called Silk Road. It can also be used, with caution, to compare religious practice there with what we know of Buddhism at the court of the Tibetan emperors in the eighth and ninth centuries especially. One aspect of this is what Arthur Waley termed “Dhāraṇī Buddhism” in his 1931 work, A Catalogue of Paintings Recovered from Tun-Huang by Sir Aurel Stein. This presentation will bring recent advances in the study of the importance and changing nature of prayer in Indic- and Chinese-language sources to bear on Pelliot tibétain 45, a stitched concertina Tibetan-language manuscript from Dunhuang that consists of a corpus of rituals dating to between the imperial and early post-imperial period. In this presentation, I will identify some of the dhāraṇīs and prayer texts found in this manuscript, with correlates provided (in somewhat different forms) in the later Tibetan canons, discuss the ritual uses of these texts evidenced in the manuscript’s marginalia, and connect the literary and artistic additions in it to central Tibet, Gilgit and South Asia during the first millennium.

Bio:
Lewis Doney is Professor of Tibetan Studies at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. He received his PhD (Study of Religions) from SOAS, University of London, in 2011 and was then engaged in postdoctoral research on early Tibetan life writing, empire and religion, Tibetan relations with South Asia and their impact on social and labour dependencies within Sino-Tibetan communities around Dunhuang, and later southern Tibetan Buddhist historiography and ritual and their relations to cultural identities and ecologies in the Himalayas. His publications include a solo-authored monograph titled The Zangs gling ma: The First Padmasambhava Biography (International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, 2014), an edited volume, Bringing Buddhism to Tibet: History and Narrative in the dBa’ bzhed Manuscript (De Gruyter, 2021) and a monograph co-authored with Brandon Dotson: Producing Buddhist Sutras in Ninth-Century Tibet: The Sutra of Limitless Life and its Dunhuang Copies Kept at the British Library (De Gruyter, 2025).

We are delighted to announce the launch of our new lecture series, “The Gandhāra Corpora Project Lecture Series”, and share the details for the inaugural hybrid lecture below, marking the beginning of what promises to be an engaging and dynamic program. The lecture series are organized by Prof. Charles DiSimone, who leads the ERC-funded project “Corpora in Greater Gandhāra. Tracing the development of Buddhist textuality and Gilgit/Bamiyan manuscript networks in the first millennium of the common era” at the Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies.

Title: Visualising Rituals in Gandhara

Speaker: Ashwini Lakshminarayanan, Cardiff University

Timing: Thursday, June 05, 2025 @ 16.00

Title:

How to Traumatize Your Opponent: Mockery in Chinese Buddhist Scholastic Debate

Abstract:

The legendary Samye debate is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of Sino-Tibetan transcultural exchange. Since the publication of Paul Demiéville’s Le Concile de Lhasa, the Dunwu dasheng zhengli jue 頓悟大乘正理決 (The Ratification of Sudden Awakening as the True Principles of Mahāyāna) has been recognized as a key Chinese source for understanding both the historical episode and the doctrinal contours of the debate it records. This talk draws attention to a seemingly minor rhetorical feature of the text and proposes to use it as a lens through which to explore the broader culture of scholastic debate in medieval China. Drawing on a range of sources, it examines mockery as a distinctive rhetorical strategy in Chinese religious disputation, deployed in both intra-Buddhist debates and inter-religious encounters with other Chinese traditions. By foregrounding this strategy, the talk reconsiders the nature of Dunwu dasheng zhengli jue as a polemical document and invites further reflection on the disparate scholastic frameworks shaping what counts as a “winnable argument” in Chinese versus Indian and Tibetan traditions.

Bio:

Xiaoming Hou is currently a Glorisun Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. She is a scholar of Chinese Buddhism specializing in Chinese Buddhist scholasticism and cross-cultural transmission. She received her Ph.D. from EPHE/PSL (École Pratique des Hautes Études/Université Paris Sciences et Lettres) in Paris, Department of Religions et Système de pensées in 2022. Her doctoral thesis, entitled Pratiquer le bouddhisme en chinois: traduction et reconstruction des enseignements sur la méditation bouddhique du IIe au VIe siècles en Chine, focuses on the interdependent dynamics between meditation and exegesis in early medieval China.

The Gandhāra Corpora Project, South Asia Network Ghent, and Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies present a lecture by Professor Nicholas Witkowski from the University of San Diego.

Title: Monastic Monsters: Historicizing Outcaste Characters in the Grotesquerie of Indian Buddhist Literature

Speaker:  Nicholas Witkowski, University of San Diego

Date and Time: October 3, 2024, at 16:00

Location: Faculteitszaal, Blandijn, faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent

Abstract: This presentation forms one pillar of a broader project to write the history of outcaste Buddhism drawing upon texts from the Buddhist legal codes (Vinaya). There is an assumption, implicit in much of early Buddhist material, as well as in much of modern scholarship, that Buddhism is primarily an upper-caste affair. In other words, the field effectively operates as though outcaste Buddhist communities lacked the agential capacity to shape the institutional and soteriological landscape of South Asian Buddhism. Articulating the contours of outcaste influence, or even presence, can prove difficult, as many cases in the Vinaya tend to mask caste status. In this presentation, I will focus on a particular Vinaya case about a monastic monster—a sexually deviant figure—in order to propose a methodological approach to reading for outcaste monastics. As postcolonial studies of colonial literature have argued, the discourse of sexual deviancy is often code for subaltern fugitivity—in this case, fugitivity from the socio-economic fetters of caste. This presentation will argue that we may read cases of sexual deviancy among monks in the Vinaya as a discursive index of upper-caste anxiety about the presence of outcaste communities in the monastery.

About the Speaker: Nicholas Witkowski is Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of San Diego. His current project, Lifestyles of Impurity, is a study of low-/outcaste monastic communities in first millennium South Asia that employs the theoretical armature of historians of the everyday. This book project integrates feminist, Marxist, post-colonialist, and Foucauldian literary-critical approaches to the study of textual sources documenting the socio-religious practices of low-/outcaste communities. What Dr. Witkowski hopes to convey is a nuanced articulation of the social locations of marginality as wellsprings of cultural innovation that continued to resist, challenge, and, in certain key respects, transform Brahmanical imperial discourse and practice across the Sanskrit cosmopolis throughout the first millennium CE.