Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita Sravasti Miracle, via Wikimedia Commons.
Speaker: Nelson Landry (University of Hamburg)
Date: Monday 11 November 2024 (Week 5 MT)
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: pyi.kyaw@ames.ox.ac.uk
Glorisun Lecture Series in Buddhist Studies 2024-2025
Kindly supported by Glorisun Global Network for Buddhist Studies
Abstract:
Since its ‘academic’ reception in the West, “Buddhism” has occupied a special place in the imaginaire of a small subset of the educated elite. It was often cast as a rational religion-qua-philosophy founded long ago by a philosopher sage in a distant land. For instance, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who only had a basic understanding of Buddhist philosophical concepts, presented the Buddha as an exemplar. He noted that the teachings of the Buddha were still relevant because they were not mired down by the corruption of a Church, as was the case according to Schopenhauer with the Christian Church corrupting the teachings of Jesus. In this post-Enlightenment era, intellectuals across Western Europe projected their rationalist ideals upon a sagely—and exotic—South Asian figure, the Buddha. When scholars such as T.W. Rhys Davids (1843–1922) studied the sources they had at hand, they were uncomfortable with the vernacular elements that appeared in the scriptures: miracle stories, descriptions of relic cults and idol worship. These cultic elements constituted the same religious and institutional “corruptions” that bothered Schopenhauer. The miraculous did not fit into the desired narrative and so an “original” Buddhism was fabricated, re-packaged, and presented to the occidental world as the real Buddhism that Siddhartha Gautama preached—i.e. a rational philosophy bereft of all vernacular religious elements. The miraculous elements in Buddhist literature were the extraneous details that distracted the seeker from the truth. This talk therefore looks to delve into the history in Occidental academia of how the ‘miraculous’ and the ‘supernatural’ were interpreted when studying the ‘orient’, focusing on South and East Asian Buddhism.
Speaker:
Nelson Landry is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hamburg specializing in Chinese Buddhist social history. His interests revolve around the transmission of Buddhism to China during the Period of Disunion and early Tang dynasty miracle tale compilations. He is presently completing a monograph on the seventh-century monk Daoxuan and the collections of miracle tales and revelatory texts that he authored late in life. He has also recently begun research on the transcultural religious culture of northern China during the medieval period.
