Glorisun Lecture Series in Buddhist Studies 2023-2024
Dates: October 16th, 2023 – February 5th, 2024
All talks take place in the Basement Teaching Room 1 at 5:00 pm, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Pusey Lane, Oxford, OX1 2LE
All are welcome for tea and snacks at 4:15 – 4:45pm (Common Room in the basement)
All enquiries should be directed to: kate.crosby@ames.ox.ac.uk
Schedule
Monday October 16, 2023 (Week 2 MT)
Angela S. Chiu (Independent scholar)
The Looting of Antiquities from Cambodia
Abstract: Douglas Latchford (1931-2020) instigated the illicit removal, smuggling, and sale of numerous antiquities from Southeast Asia, from the 1960s until not long before his indictment by US authorities in 2019. This talk reviews the repertory of tactics he deployed to legitimise stolen artefacts and to establish his reputation in the elite world of international museums and collectors. Latchford’s career – and the welcome reception he too – often received from the art world – will be considered in the context of the history of the looting of Cambodia and particularly the politically and commercially-driven re-conception of Angkorian art that began under colonialism.
Biography: Angela S. Chiu is an independent art historian. Her PhD thesis on Thai Buddhist art and literature was the basis for her book, The Buddha in Lanna, published by the University of Hawai‘i Press in 2017. Her research on the illicit market for Cambodian and Thai artefacts has contributed to reporting by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the Washington Post, ABC News of Australia and the Denver Post, among other organisations.
November 6, 2023 (Week 5 MT)
Potprecha (Jak) Cholvijarn (Chulalongkorn University)
Supreme Patriarch Suk Kai Thuean’s (1733-1822) method of visualization of the six elements (dhātu)
Abstract:This short borān meditation manual for advanced practitioners is found in Luang Visan Darunnakon’s collection of meditation texts belonging to Supreme Patriarch Suk Kai Thuean (1733-1822), the fourth Supreme Patriarch of Bangkok. It serves as a summary and memory aid for the practice of visualizing the six elements (earth, water, wind, fire, space, and consciousness), represented by sacred Pāli syllables, in order to achieve the eight supernormal knowledges and powers (vijjā). The manual is no longer taught at Wat Ratchasittharam, Thonburi, where a living lineage of Supreme Patriarch Suk Kai Thuean’s system is preserved. However, there is evidence of a living lineage outside Wat Ratchasittharam whose practice is based on this manual.
November 20, 2023 (Week 7 MT)
Henry Albery (Ghent University)
Meditations of a Vaibhāṣika Bodhisattva
Abstract:The Yogalehrbuch, a Sanskrit Buddhist ‘yoga manual’ from the Kučā region of the Tarim Basin in the mid first millennium, is a unique and puzzling work. It comprises a series of doctrinally familiar meditations, each of which is presented as an antidote to certain unwanted aspects of phenomenal experience, from how one perceives the objective world to the cognitive, emotional and physical aspects of the personality. Yet it does so in a manner which seemingly falls outside of any neat doctrinal definition or taxonomy. The meditations are highly vivid, symbolically loaded, and of truly cosmic proportions, with the yoga practitioner (yogācāra) traversing the plains of existence, from the heavens above to the hells below, and receiving ritual consecrations for his insights along the way, until the climax of the drama unfolds in his becoming a bodhisattva, purposed towards the liberation of all. This curious admixture of features has posed many problems, being at once reminiscent of Sarvāstivāda, Mahāyāna and Tantric streams of philosophy and practice. However, as this presentation will seek to show, the text was likely far more “orthodox” than is often presumed, exhibiting several parallels with the Vibhāṣā, the preeminent scholastic treatise of the Vaibhāṣika school, whose conception of reality the Yogalehrbuch seeks to put into practice, as the meditations, namely, of a Vaibhāṣika Bodhisattva.
Biography: Henry Albery completed his PhD in Jndology and the Study of Religions at Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat Miinchen in 2020, with a focus on the history of Buddhism in the lndic North and Northwest. Until September of this year he was a FWO Junior Postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University, with a project entitled Avadiina as Analogy: An Inquiry into Buddhist Law and Narrative, which he will be continuing from November as a JSPS International fellow at the University of Tokyo. He is also part of the ongoing collaborative project, An English Translation of a Sanskrit Buddhist Yoga Manual from Kuca, funded by the H. N. Ho family foundation Grants for Critical Editions and Scholarly Translations.
November 22 (Wednesday) and November 23, 2023 (Thursday), 3.30-5pm (Week 7 MT)
Henry Albery (Ghent University)
Reading the Sanskrit Buddhist Yoga Manual from Kučā
Abstract: Henry Albery will be reading passages of the Yoga Manual, the text from his talk (see above) with us.
Biography: Henry Albery completed his PhD in Jndology and the Study of Religions at Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat Miinchen in 2020, with a focus on the history of Buddhism in the lndic North and Northwest. Until September of this year he was a FWO Junior Postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University, with a project entitled Avadiina as Analogy: An Inquiry into Buddhist Law and Narrative, which he will be continuing from November as a JSPS International fellow at the University of Tokyo. He is also part of the ongoing collaborative project, An English Translation of a Sanskrit Buddhist Yoga Manual from Kuca, funded by the H. N. Ho family foundation Grants for Critical Editions and Scholarly Translations.
December 4, 2023 (Week 9 MT; 11.00–13.00)
Pali manuscript review presented by Andrew Skilton
Horton Room, Weston Library, Oxford
Abstract: We have been given permission by Gillian Evison, Head of Oriental Section & Indian Institute Librarian, to hold a review of the Pali manuscript collection in the Bodleian Library this term.
This will be an introduction for students with an interest in Pali manuscript culture and those who have seen similar reviews of Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan mss. etc. in the collection. I will be calling up a representative selection of Pali manuscripts and some associated documentation to introduce the shape, form, languages, spread and provenance of Pali manuscripts from South and Southeast Asia at the Bodleian Library.
Numbers will be limited for purely practical reasons, and so if you are interested, please register your interest by email – andrew.skilton@ames.ox.ac.uk.
Rules: no touching the mss., no pens, no food, drink or animals in the room.
January 22, 2024 (Week 2 HT)
Eviatar Shulman (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
On the Composition of the Saṃyutta-nikāya and its unique theory of liberation
Abstract: The differences between the Nikāyas, the collections of early discourses attributed to the historical Buddha, are apparent even to the uniformed observer. These collections present themselves as collections differentiated mainly according to their length: Long (Dīgha) or Middle-Length (Majjhima), and shorter discoursed that are Woven or Connected according to theme (Saṃyutta) or to numbered organization (Sequential, Aṅguttara). However, a closer and more careful look reveals that each collection is more a method of generating scripture according to a particular genric mode, based on collection-specific formulas, narrative designs, and even ideas.
Generally, the composition of the early discourses is based on different combinations of fixed formulas, of both narrative and doctrinal types, according to a technique I have called “the play of formulas.” In this talk, we will examine the techniques preferred by the authors of the Saṃyutta-Nikāya, focusing on their chosen formulas, narrative designs, and literary methods. These allow us to see a strong performative element behind the texts, so that the versions we find before us today are possible workings out of the method; it is the method, together with the formulas, that is early. Examining the Saṃyutta in this way through a focus on formulas, allows us to see that its authors had their own theory of liberation, which can be clearly distinguished from that of the Majjhima (and with it the Dīgha; the Aṅguttara is a different case altogether). Together, this examination of text and practice within the Saṃyutta mode, and more broadly within the early discourses, allows us to identify the flexible and exploratory context of both text and meditative practice in early Buddhism.
Biography: Eviatar Shulman studies and teaches Buddhist religion and philosophy in the departments of Comparative Religion and Asian Studies and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is author of Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception (Cambridge University Press 2014) and Visions of the Buddha: Creative Dimensions of Early Buddhist Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2021), as well as a series of articles in scholarly journals.
February 5, 2024 (Week 4 HT)
Barend J. ter Haar (University of Hamburg)
From studying Chinese religion Buddhologically from the outside, towards studying it on its own terms
Abstract:
This talk will begin from a brief discussion of the customary labels Buddhism, Daoism and popular religion. Although many Buddhologists are aware of the problem, they still divide their fields according to these rather late, very Western labels. By approaching Chinese religious life, modern or traditional, from a single –ism or label, we distort its reality and easily fall into pejorative notions of decline, orthodoxy versus heterodoxy, distortion and so forth. Instead, I will argue that for the small number of people who were actively concerned with reshaping their lifestyle around religious concerns, rather than a direct focus on life cycle rituals and efficacy, there was a definitive orthopraxis that was heavily indebted to “Buddhist” tradition but could also be freely combined with elements from other traditions. Indeed, instead of constructing Chinese religious history into traditions, we can see it as a choice from a broader repertoire of cultural resources (or options, as I have called it before). The concrete case I propose to discuss is that of the Way of Yellow Heaven (huangtiandao 黃天道), which was both very Buddhist in lifestyle and socio-religious organisation, as well as indebted to inner alchemical techniques that we customarily label as Daoist. I will conclude with a brief comparison to Buddhist practices elsewhere in Southeast Asia where this combination appears to be quite normal.
Biography: Barend J. ter Haar studied in Leiden, China (Shenyang) and Japan (Osaka, Fukuoka and Tokyo) and taught in Leiden, Heidelberg, Oxford. At present he is professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Hamburg, focusing on Chinese language and literature as well as a visiting professor at the Sichuan Univers ity, Chengdu, China. He worked on various aspects of Chinese social history and religious culture and hopes to have finished his book on the fear of witches finally (and again!) by the time he gives this talk. His next projects include a study -of the social and cultural history of sound and silence, and a bottom history of religious life in traditional China.
Kindly supported by Glorisun Global Network for Buddhist Studies.
