Category: Guest lectures

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.

On Friday, February 23, 2024, the Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies welcomed Professor Neil Schmid 史瀚文 from the Dunhuang Academy 敦煌研究院. In the beginning of the meeting with the GCBS researchers, Neil Schmid introduced the Dunhuang Academy, which is located in Gansu province of China and engages in conservation and research of a number of major Buddhist cave sites in the Hexi corridor, most prominently the Mogao caves in Dunhuang. Comprised of about 120 full-time researchers and over 1000 staff, the academy runs its own Journal of Dunhuang Research and shares some of its resources with the general public through the Digital Dunhuang platform. Neil Schmid’s own project at the Academy aims at publishing a comprehensive guide to scholarly resources on Dunhuang studies for Western scholars.

In the second part of the meeting, Professor Schmid shared with the students his experience using various kinds of software to streamline their research activities. He advised using Zotero to create bibliographies, accumulate libraries of PDFs, and manage them with tags. Another useful piece of software is the cloud-based Devonthink that Neil Schmid uses for storing images and other resources related to each of the Buddhist caves. Finally, according to him, the best solution for writing a book is Scrivener, which allows you to store data locally, synchronize on multiple devices (i.e., the notes that you make on your tablet will also appear on your computer), tag and connect notes.

Last but not least, the young scholars of the GCBS had an opportunity to ask their questions and discuss their ongoing research. The topics touched upon the social history of Dunhuang, the development of imagery of Buddhist deities, and the Dunhuang-related resources in the collection of the National Museum of India. GCSB’s Professors Ann Heirman and Christoph Anderl proceeded to discuss possible cooperation between the GCBS and Dunhuang Academy after the meeting.

Report author: Mariia Lepneva