Date: May 10, 2023, 4:30 pm
Speaker: James Robson (Harvard University)
Location: Room 5318, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Abstract:
This talk discussed why certain types of East Asian religious images have been accepted, propagated, worshipped, and eventually enshrined within Western museums (and museums of the imagination), while other types of images have been proscribed, actively destroyed, and ignored by scholars and museums. Certain sacred images and icons, especially those with materials (manuscripts, relics, materia medica) put inside of them at the time of consecration, inspire extreme forms of devotion, while others have presented problems for priests, politicians, philosophers, and academics who for various reasons have throughout history found them distasteful, attacked their validity and power, and have tried to hide them away or destroy them. Yet, even in the face of critique and destruction they have proliferated.
About the Speaker:
James Robson is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. He has served as Director of Graduate Studies for the Regional Studies East Asia M.A. program. He teaches East Asian religions, in particular Daoism, Chinese Buddhism, and Zen. Robson received his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Stanford University in 2002, after spending many years doing research in China, Taiwan, and Japan. He specializes in the history of medieval Chinese Buddhism and Daoism and is particularly interested in issues of sacred geography, local religious history, talismans, and Chan/Zen Buddhism. He has been engaged in a long-term collaborative research project with the École Française d’Extrême-Orient studying local religious statuary from Hunan province. He is the author of Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak [Nanyue 南嶽] in Medieval China (Harvard, 2009), which was awarded the Stanislas Julien Prize for 2010 by the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres and the 2010 Toshihide Numata Book Prize in Buddhism. Robson is also the author of “Signs of Power: Talismanic Writings in Chinese Buddhism” (History of Religions 48:2), “Faith in Museums: On the Confluence of Museums and Religious Sites in Asia” (PMLA, 2010), and “A Tang Dynasty Chan Mummy [roushen] and a Modern Case of Furta Sacra? Investigating the Contested Bones of Shitou Xiqian.” His current research includes a long term project on the history of the confluence of Buddhist monasteries and mental hospitals in Japan.
