Category: Guest lectures

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.

On May 14, 2024, Dr. Swosti Rajbhandari Kayastha will deliver a guest lecture titled “The Community Museum of the Itumbaha Buddhist Monastery, Kathmandu” within the framework of the bachelor-level course “Art and Archaeology of South Asia” organized by GCBS’s Daniela De Simone.

Dr. Swosti Rajbhandari Kayastha is a cultural heritage scholar and a museum and gallery professional working with Nepal Art Council as curator and PR officer. She received her MA in Nepalese History, Culture and Archaeology from Tribhuvan University in Nepal and another Master’s degree in Museum and Gallery Practice from University College, London.

On May 7, 2024, Prof. Dr. Halle O‘Neal will deliver a guest lecture titled “The Multiple Lives of Buddhist Objects: Enriching Art Historical Methodologies” within the framework of our master-level course “Culture in Perspective: South and East Asia”, organized by Dr. Mathieu Torck and Prof. Dr. Ann Heirman.

Halle O’Neal is a Reader in Japanese Buddhist art in the History of Art department and Co-Director of Edinburgh Buddhist Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is authored Word Embodied: The Jeweled Pagoda Mandalas in Japanese Buddhist Art (Harvard University Asia Cente, 2018) and edited Reuse and Recycling in Japanese Visual and Material Cultures (vol. 52 of Ars Orientalis, 2023).

On March 19, 2024, Dr. Swosti Rajbhandari Kayastha will deliver a guest lecture titled “Tibetan and Himalayan Art” within the framework of the bachelor-level course “Art and Archaeology of South Asia” organized by GCBS’s Daniela De Simone.

Dr. Swosti Rajbhandari Kayastha is a cultural heritage scholar and a museum and gallery professional working with Nepal Art Council as curator and PR officer. She received her MA in Nepalese History, Culture and Archaeology from Tribhuvan University in Nepal and another Master’s degree in Museum and Gallery Practice from University College, London.