15-16 December, The Foyle Suite, British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB

The British Library and International Dunhuang Project will be hosting a conference to celebrate the close of the Lotus Sutra Manuscripts Conservation and Digitisation Project (https://www.bl.uk/…/lotus-sutra-manuscripts-digitisation) on 15 and 16 December.

The keynote will be delivered by Professor Stephen Teiser and the rest of the programme will bring together a group of scholars and the Project team to investigate the teachings of the Lotus Sutra, the transmission of the Lotus Sutra in Dunhuang and the methodology and results of the Lotus Sutra project, which has now conserved, digitised and published on the IDP website nearly 800 manuscripts of the scriptures in the Stein Collection.The conference is free and open to the public.

It would be lovely to count you among our attendees as we will hold it in person, in the Library’s Foyle Suite, but it will also be possible to attend online via live-streaming. For registration and the full programme, please check Eventbrite: https://t.co/cMvWwdDWuX

Professor Antje Richter, University of Colorado Boulder

Chaired by Dr Xiaojing Miao, Pembroke College

Location: Harold Lee Room, Pembroke College

Time: 1 December, 2022, 14:00-16:00 GMT

The silence of Vimalakirti is a famous moment in Mahayana Buddhism. The householder’s decision to respond with “thundering silence” when asked to explain his understanding of non-duality forms the doctrinal and narrative culmination of the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa-sūtra, a text that mostly consists of a lively and occasionally even humorous back and forth in conversation in front of various audiences. The “scripture of the teaching of Vimalakirti” emerged in India in the first or second century CE and gained immense literary, religious, and cultural currency in East Asia, through Chinese translations that started circulating since the late second century. Scholars have discussed the sutra from many angles, but its narrative form has received little scholarly interest so far.

This talk analyzes Vimalakirti’s silence against two foils that the sutra itself sets up. The first foil is one of non-silence: the conversational pattern that underlies the sutra’s narrative and discursive progression. Turn-taking in this text is both highly formalized and open to surprising twists, not least because the setting of the conversation moves several times, both in this world and to alternative universes, along with the composition of the internal audience. The second foil is one of silence, because Vimalakirti’s celebrated silence is not the only occasion a main protagonist of the text chooses not to answer a question asked of him. Both foils contribute to the performative effect of Vimalakirti’s silence, in narrative as well as doctrinal terms. The talk will embed reflections on the narrative role of silence in the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa-sūtra into native Chinese notions of speaking and not speaking, which both precede and postdate the introduction of the sutra in China. On a metalevel, the talk hopes to contribute to the extension and establishment of narrative approaches to Buddhist texts and medieval Chinese literature.

Antje Richter, Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, received her PhD from LMU Munich 1998. Her publications include Letter Writing and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China (2013), A History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture (2015), several co-edited volumes, and more than 30 articles. She is currently completing a monograph on notions of health and illness in medieval Chinese literature.

To sign up, please contact Dr Xiaojing Miao ([email protected]) or Dr Christopher Foster ([email protected])

28 November, 2022

The Nanzhao and Dali Kingdoms prospered throughout China’s Southwest frontier between the eighth and thirteenth centuries. Nanzhao-Dali coexisted with Tang-Song China, Tibet and the surrounding Southeast Asian civilisations. Buddhism was an important component of the Kingdoms, with the capital understood as a centre for Buddhist learning. For this workshop, we have invited scholars, curators, and researchers from museums and institutions to share their relevant research on Nanzhao-Dali and the surrounding regions from different aspects. We will take some in-depth looks at the material culture, archaeology and history of Buddhism in the region to gain a better understanding of the development of Buddhism in Nanzhao-Dali. We hope you will join us!

LOCATION: Room 303, Lipman Building, 2 Sandyford Rd, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8SB

CONTACT: [email protected]

The International Research Centre for the History and Culture of Nanzhao and Dali Kingdoms (IRC), established in 2019, is a collaborative venture between Northumbria University, UK, Yunnan Provincial Museum, China, and the Woon Brothers Foundation, Singapore. The aim of the IRC is to promote academic research into the history and culture of the Nanzhao and Dali Kingdoms (dating from 653-937CE and 937-1253CE, respectively), located largely in today’s Yunnan province in southwest China.

Lecture Room 1 at 5pm 

Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies 

Pusey Lane 

Oxford, OX1 2LE 

All Welcome 

All enquiries: [email protected] 

Michaelmas Term 2022 

Monday 7 November 2022 

Ligeia Lugli, The Mangalam Research Centre, Berkeley, California. 

Modelling the Dharma: advances in Buddhist Sanskrit Corpus linguistics and Natural Language Processing 

This talk introduces a new corpus of Buddhist Sanskrit literature that is being developed at the Mangalam Research Centre (Berkeley, California). After presenting the corpus and some of the problems that it poses, the talk will outline the motivations that led to its creation and the methodological avenues that it opens up. It will briefly report on the experimentations with different Word Embedding Models for Buddhist Sanskrit that are currently underway at the Mangalam Research Centre. It then offers some practical examples of how the corpus can be used for Buddhist studies.  

Ligeia Lugli holds a PhD in Study of Religions from SOAS, where she worked on the Mahāyāna discourse on language. Since 2016 she is Head of Lexicography at the Mangalam Research Centre (Berkeley, California), where she directs the Buddhist Translators Workbench, a project aimed at creating digital resources for the study of the Buddhist Sanskrit vocabulary. She is currently also leading a project on Buddhist Sanskrit Natural Language Processing, in collaboration with researchers from the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. At the same time, she is working on the development of a Buddhist Sanskrit corpus, with funding from the Khyentse Foundation, and a programme of education in digital lexicography at the State University of São Paulo, with funding from Brazil’s Ministry of Education. 

Monday 28 November 2022 

Andrew Skilton, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford 

The Prohibition of Anal Surgery in the Vinaya 

This talk unpacks the prohibition on anal surgery in the bhesajjakhanda/bhaiṣajyavastu section of the Vinaya, revealing a detailed familiarity with the dangers of such surgery, the risks of sexual misinterpretation and the importance of focusing in on technical terminology when translating Buddhist texts.  

Andrew Skilton conducts research on Mahāyāna and Vinaya literature in Sanskrit and Pali, which he teaches in the faculty. He is interested in the interpretation of texts. He has held posts in Cardiff, King’s College, London, and the Bodleian Library.   

April 8–9th 2022, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge.

With support from the Global Humanities Initiative at the University of Cambridge, the Faculty of Divinity and Selwyn College invite scholars and students to a conference devoted to the theme of Buddhist identities across twenty-first century Asia. Over two days, invited and selected speakers will address the evolving status of Asian Buddhist identities as they are constructed, negotiated and intersect with other commitments and affiliations in the globalized, technologized twenty-first century. Speakers will explore the character, changes and challenges of Buddhist identities in a range of contemporary Asian cultures, considering South, Southeast, Central and East Asian Buddhist contexts.For registration and the complete schedule, visit: https://tinyurl.com/cubuddhistidentitiesconference.

We welcome and encourage in-person attendance by all interested parties, but request that all in-person attendees register by April 1st 2022. The conference will also be broadcast via Zoom. The conference has some funds available to support student travel to the event; to request this, or to make other enquiries, please email [email protected].