Workshop on Buddhism and the Religious Other
On September 9-10, 2018, the Glorisun Global Buddhist Network at the University of Oxford supported a workshop on the theme of Buddhism and the Religious Other. This entailed two days of papers and discussion concerned with the representations of non-Buddhist ideas, practices, and their exponents in South and East Asian Buddhist literature. While the first day focused on Buddhism in its Indian context – featuring papers that dealt with Buddhist understanding of its relationship to Brahmanism and Jainism in particular – the second day was devoted to questions of Buddhist identity and ‘othering’ in East Asian Buddhist history.
Participants presented on the formation of Buddhist identity in tandem with developments in organized Daoism (Christine Mollier, CNRS Paris); expressions of distinctive Buddhist identity contra Daoism in the medieval period (Stephen Bokenkamp, Arizona State University), and the dynamics of Buddhist identity in China as informed by patterns of religious discourse across Eurasia (Antonello Palumbo, SOAS London). Papers in the afternoon concerned Buddhist mechanisms for understanding Neo-Confucianism (Tim Barrett, SOAS London) and the boundaries between Buddhist and extraneous ritual in Heian Japan (Benedetta Lomi, University of Bristol).
The event was hosted by Christopher V. Jones, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford.
