Kumarajiva in front of Kizil Caves, Kuqa, Xinjiang, China, via Wikimedia Commons.
Speaker: Irene Lok (University of Oxford)
Date: Monday 2 November 2026 (Week 4 HT)
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
Abstract:
The discovery of the sealed Library Cave (Cave 17) in 1900 transformed the study of Buddhism and Dunhuang along the Silk Roads. Tens of thousands of manuscripts and documents, produced between the late fourth and early eleventh centuries, were preserved in the cave. They allow Buddhist texts to be studied not only as canonical works but as physical objects that were copied, circulated, read, used, preserved, and sometimes forgotten. A newly discovered manuscript of the Sūtra of Brahmā’s Questions 思益梵天所問經 provides the focused case study. This long-lost and recently rediscovered manuscript opens questions of textual history, provenance, transmission, material form, and the value of manuscript evidence for reconstructing Buddhist intellectual and devotional worlds.
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.
