Buddhist Studies Forum
Harvard Buddhist Studies Forum featuring James Benn – Meditation in the Surangama Sutra
Speaker: James Benn, Professor and Director of the Centre for Buddhist Studies, McMaster University Please note earlier start time. In the later Chinese Buddhist tradition one text above all others has […]
Trent Walker – The Scattering of the Thirty-Two Minds: A Southeast Asian Buddhist Doctrine of Rebirth
Speaker: Trent Walker, Lecturer, Department of Religious Studies; Postdoctoral Fellow, The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies, Stanford University Presented via Zoom Registration Required Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0ucuCrqjIvGdHcV9R5NW15u5jLGwLD4M7j
Buddhist Studies Forum Featuring Matthew King – Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire
Speaker: Matthew King, Associate Professor of Transnational Buddhism and Director, Asian Studies Program, University of California, Riverside After the fall of the Qing empire, amid nationalist and socialist upheaval, Buddhist monks in the Mongolian frontiers of the Soviet Union and Republican China faced a chaotic and increasingly uncertain world. In this book, Matthew W. King […]
Elizabeth Angowski – A Clash of Clawed Significations: Reading and Rereading the Life of Yeshé Tsogyal and the Story of the Starving Tigress
Speaker: Elizabeth Angowski, Assistant Professor of Religion, Earlham College For an eager bodhisattva intent on honing the virtue of generosity, there would appear to be no shortage of starving tigresses to feed, or so it must have seemed to Yeshé Tsogyal, an eighth-century tantric adept renowned for her role in disseminating Buddhism throughout Tibet. Within […]
Harvard Buddhist Studies Forum Featuring Aaron Proffitt – Buddha’s Name as Mantra in Medieval Japan
Speaker: Aaron Proffitt, Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies, University at Albany-SUNY The recitation of the name of a buddha (nenbutsu) is often associated with deathbed practices and traditions commonly grouped under the rubric Pure Land Buddhism. In this talk, Professor Aaron Proffitt will consider this widely popular practice as understood by practitioners of mantra, focusing […]
Norihisa Baba – Sanskrit vs Pāli: Buddhaghosa’s Linguistic Turn and its Impacts on Mainland Southeast Asia
Presented via ZoomTopics: Speakers Venue
Buddhist Studies Forum Featuring Julia Cross – Relic Transfers and Statue-Reliquaries in Medieval Japan
Presented via ZoomTopics: Speaker: Julia Cross, Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies and Lecturer in Religious Studies, Yale University Prior to the medieval period, Buddha relics (Sk. śarīra; dhātu) in Japan were typically under the domain of the court or court-related temples. In the Kamakura era (1185–1333), this shifted, however, as relic worship became increasingly accessible to temples […]
Buddhist Studies Forum featuring Halvor Eifring – Let the mind wander towards the Pure Land: Two 19th-Century Chinese Monks on How to Treat Spontaneous Thought
Presented via ZoomTopics: Speaker: Halvor Eifring, University of Oslo Mind wandering has been an issue within contemplative traditions for more than two thousand years. How to go about your meditation or prayer when spontaneous thoughts constantly pull your mind in other directions? This talk will focus on the answers of two 19th-century Chinese Pure Land Buddhist monks, […]
Victor Fan – The Insight-Image: Illuminating the Reality of Deleuze’s Time-Image
Barker Center, Thompson Room 12 Quincy St, Cambridge, MASpeaker: Victor Fan, King's College London In Zen Buddhism, the notion of here and now is the key to attain––or return to––paññā/prajñā (insight). On a day-to-day basis, we live each moment with a preoccupation of the past and an anticipation for the future. Our retrospection and expectation produce afflictions such as avarice, anger and frustration, as […]
Annabelle Pitkin – Renunciation and the Practice of Care: Himalayan Buddhist Embodiments of Longing and Devotion
Barker Center, Thompson Room 12 Quincy St, Cambridge, MASpeaker: Annabella Pitkin, Assistant Professor of Buddhism and East Asian Religions, Lehigh UniversityDevotion plays a central role in Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist accounts of guru-disciple relationship, part of an ideal of indivisible connection between gurus and disciples. This theme of devotional connection intersects in complex ways with another influential Buddhist ideal, that of renunciation. Tibetan narratives […]
Brandon Dotson – Marginal Comedy and the Production of Sutras in 9th-Century Dunhuang
Barker Center, Thompson Room 12 Quincy St, Cambridge, MASpeaker: Brandon Dotson, Associate Professor and Thomas P. McKenna Chair of Buddhist Studies, Georgetown University There is something delightful about jottings and doodles in the margins of religious books. Perhaps it is the counterpoint that they offer to the generally serious and devout contents of the texts they abut. Perhaps it is also that marginalia […]