Saint-Petersburg. Buddhist Datsan. The mythical guardian lion, via Wikimedia Commons.
Speaker: Irene Lok (University of Oxford)
Date: Monday 30 November 2026 (Week 8)
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:
This lecture follows the Buddhist lion as image, symbol, and travelling form. Beginning with the lion in Indian Buddhist culture—as a sign of sovereignty and power, the Buddha as Śākyasiṃha, the “Lion of the Śākyas,” and the teaching of the Dharma as the lion’s roar—it considers how lion imagery moved across cultures and acquired new visual forms and functions. A lion-statue case study will anchor the lecture in material evidence while opening onto larger questions of transmission, transformation, loss, memory, and survival. The disappearance or absence of an object in cave temples need not end its history: its meanings, images, textual traces, and cultural descendants may continue. The lecture deliberately leaves a final space for imagination: if the lion is no longer there, can its roar still be heard?
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.
