Eighth century Dunhuang cave mural depicting Xuanzang returning from India. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Speaker: Irene Lok (University of Oxford)
Date: Monday 16 November 2026 (Week 6)
Basement Teaching Room 1 at 5:00pm
Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Pusey Lane, Oxford, OX1 2LE
All Welcome
Tea and snacks at 4:30–4:50pm (Common Room in the basement)
All enquiries: yuling.wu@balliol.ox.ac.uk
Glorisun Lecture Series in Buddhist Studies, Michaelmas Term 2026
Kindly supported by Glorisun Global Network for Buddhist Studies
In Weeks 2, 4, 6, and 8, Irene Lok will deliver a series of lectures investigating Dunhuang manuscripts, cave murals, Buddha iconography, and symbolic forms.
Abstract:
The murals of the Mogao and Yulin caves provide an extraordinary record of Buddhist visual culture spanning a millennium, from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries. Their subjects and techniques reveal connections with India and Central Asia while also showing the emergence of distinctive local and Chinese forms. Selected examples—including the Nine-Coloured Deer 九⾊⿅ and High Tang music and dance imagery—introduce Buddhist narrative, moral teaching, and the cultural world represented at Dunhuang. The principal case study is Yulin Cave 25 and its Pure Land imagery. Read alongside the Maitreya scriptures, the cave allows students to consider how textual descriptions of a sacred world could be selected, reorganised, expanded, and made visually and spatially present.
Speaker:
Dr Irene Lok 駱慧瑛 is a Glorisun Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Dunhuang Academy. She received her PhD from the University of Hong Kong, where she serves as Honorary Research Fellow and Art Advisor at the Jao Tsung-I Petite École. She is also a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge and was previously a Bye-Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge. Her research focuses on Buddhist art in Dunhuang and Turfan, particularly the relationship between Buddhist texts and images. She is the author of the Chinese-language books Contemplating the Mind at Ease: The Guanyin Festival and the Origins of Guanyin Belief in Hong Kong 《觀⼼⾃在：⾹港觀⾳誕與觀⾳信仰探源》 (2020), which received the Hong Kong Publishing Biennial Award, and Serendipity at Dunhuang 《緣繫敦煌》 (2025). Her current research explores the visual transformation of Buddhist scriptures, with particular attention to the Guanyin Sūtra, manuscripts, murals, and devotional practice along the Silk Roads.
