OVERVIEW

15 May 2023 at 5:00-6:00pm
Laurence Cox and Brian Bocking
Researching colonial Buddhist history from below – Irish-Burmese monk U Dhammaloka, subaltern perspectives and plebeian movements

22 May 2023 at 7:00-8:30pm
Ajahn Brahmali, Venerable Canda and Guest Bhikkhuni (Registration required)
Two Buddhist Nuns & a Monk Discuss the Buddha’s Views on Women & Gender

24 May 2023 at 9:00-10:30am
Ajahn Brahmali (Registration required)
A monastic approach to translating Buddhist texts

5 June 2023 at 2:00-3:30pm
The Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture by Harold Roth (In person and online)
A Zen Foundation for Critical Subjectivity in the New Field of Contemplative Studies

26 June 2023 at 5:00-6:00pm
Wang Song
A debate on infinity paradox in Chinese Buddhist tradition
(無窮過：中國佛教探討的一個哲學問題)
5, 12, 19 May and 2, 16 June at 2.30-4:00pm

Pali Texts Reading (via Teams. Registration required)

University of Oxford
Glorisun Lecture Series in Buddhist Studies 2022-2023
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 4:15 – 4:45pm (Common Room in the basement)
All enquiries: [email protected]

15 May 2023

Laurence Cox and Brian Bocking

Researching colonial Buddhist history from below – Irish-Burmese monk U Dhammaloka, subaltern perspectives and plebeian movements

The problem is not always whether the subaltern can speak: it is whether anyone will record and archive it when they do. Moreover, when working-class radicals seek to avoid repression, this can be entertaining for historians but also a problem for their research. With Alicia Turner and the help of an extensive international network of researchers, Laurence Cox and Brian Bocking spent a decade researching the Irish emigrant, sailor, hobo, Buddhist monk and anti-colonial activist U Dhammaloka (1856 – 1913?) – a man with at least five aliases, a 25-year gap in his biography, the target of police and government surveillance and a proto-extradition attempt, someone who faked his own death and eventually disappeared. The lecture discusses some of the challenges of ‘history from below’ in relation to working-class voices, radical social movements, and subaltern ethnicities. It also notes the specific interests of religious organisations and academic disciplines in constructing suitably respectable origin myths to fit contemporary needs.

Laurence Cox is Professor of Sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth and has published widely on Buddhist Studies and social movements. A particular area of interest has been uncovering the history of Irish involvement in late C19th and early C20th Buddhist Revival activities in Asia and Europe, including the first Buddhist mission to Europe (1889-1892). With Alicia Turner and Brian Bocking, he recently published The Irish Buddhist: the Forgotten Monk who Faced Down the British Empire (OUP 2020), using the life of Dhammaloka as a lens to explore Asian Buddhist networks.

Brian Bocking (MA Lancaster, PhD Leeds) is emeritus Professor of the Study of Religions at University College Cork, Ireland (retired 2015), previously holding posts at the universities of Stirling, Tsukuba (Japan), Bath Spa and SOAS, London. He has worked on Japanese religions, Buddhism, and the Study of Religions. His books include Nagarjuna in China, with the first full English translation of the 5th-century Chinese text of Nagarjuna’s ‘Middle Treatise’ (1995); A Popular Dictionary of Shinto (1996); and The Oracles of the Three Shrines: Windows on Japanese Religion, a study of the changing form and interpretations over four centuries of a key Japanese religious scroll called the sanja takusen

(2000). With Laurence Cox and the late Yoshinaga Shin’ichi he has researched and published on the forgotten Irish Japanologist and pioneer London Buddhist missionary Charles J W Pfoundes (1840-1907) and together with Alicia Turner and Laurence Cox has co-authored The Irish Buddhist: The Forgotten Monk who Faced Down the British Empire (2000) which reconstructs the life (c. 1856-1914) of the Irish Burmese radical monk U Dhammaloka.

26 June 2023

Wang Song

A debate on infinity paradox in Chinese Buddhist tradition

(無窮過：中國佛教探討的一個哲學問題)

The discussion on ‘infinity paradox’ (無窮過) is widely seen in philosophical traditions around the world, such as those in China, India, and Greece. In the field of ontology, it is generally used to derive the first cause. In the debate on specific propositions, it is used as a fallacy proof. For instance, Chinese philosophers like Zhuangzi, Guo Xiang and their Indian counterparts, such as Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, and others have all explored the problem of ‘infinity paradox’. After Buddhism was introduced to China, Hua-yan Buddhism philosophers such as Zhiyan and Fazang interfused the two major traditions and proposed the theory of ‘endless origins’ (無盡緣起). Zhang Taiyan (章太炎), a modern philosopher, responded to this based on his philosophical position of ‘Tathagata Monism’ (真如一元論) and put forward different views. This lecture will review relevant literature and analyze the dual perspectives of Buddhist philosophy on this issue.

Professor Song WANG received his B.A. and M.A. from Peking University and Ph.D. in East Asian Buddhism from the International College for Postgraduate Buddhist Studies, Tokyo. Prior to teaching at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of Peking University in 2005, he conducted his postdoctoral research as Overseas Researcher of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). His publications include A Study on the Thought of the Huayan School in the Song Dynasty (2008), Japanese Buddhism: From the Beginning till 20th century (2015), and A Critical Annotation and Study on the Huayan Fajie Guanmen (2016), and numerous papers on East Asian Buddhism in Chinese, Japanese and English.

Kindly supported by Glorisun Global Network for Buddhist Studies.

Two Buddhist Nuns & a Monk Discuss the Buddha’s Views on Women & Gender

Debate by Ajahn Brahmali, Venerable Canda and Guest Bhikkhuni

Monday 22 May, 7.00 – 8.30pm

Leonard Wolfson Auditorium,

Linton Rd, Oxford, OX2 6UD

Join Ajahn Brahmali, Venerable Canda and a guest bhikkhuni for this thought-provoking debate, including the seeming paradox between women & gender, and non-self.

Hear from experts in the field as they explore and analyze the historical context and teachings of the Buddha on this important topic. Gain a deeper understanding of the role of women in Buddhism and learn about contemporary perspectives on gender and equality. This event promises to be an enlightening and stimulating discussion. Don’t miss out on the chance to engage in this important dialogue and expand your understanding of this fascinating topic!

About Ajahn Brahmali

Renowned meditation teacher Ajahn Brahmali is visiting England to lead his second meditation retreat & give an exciting series of Dhamma talks!

A close disciple of Ajahn Brahm, Ajahn Brahmali is known for his for joyful teaching style and incredible understanding of the Early Buddhist Texts. His talks bring the Buddha’s teachings to life in ways that we can readily apply, to help us find more happiness and peace in our lives.

Register at anukampaproject.org/events.

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A monastic approach to translating Buddhist texts

By Ajahn Brahmali

Wednesday 24 May, 9.00-10.30am

Old Common Room, Balliol

To register, contact: [email protected]

Ajahn Brahmali, whose well-received translations of the Vinaya are available on sutta-central, discusses with us his approach to translating from Pali. Anyone interested or engaged in translating from Pali is welcome to join us. Please email [email protected] to confirm your attendance.

Kindly supported by Glorisun Global Network for Buddhist Studies.

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University of Oxford

Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series

5 June 2023 at 2:00-3:30pm

Basement Teaching Room 1

Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Pusey Lane

Oxford, OX1 2LE

All Welcome

Tea and snacks at 3:30-4:00pm (Common Room in the basement)

All enquiries: [email protected]

Harold Roth (Professor of religious studies, Brown University)

A Zen Foundation for Critical Subjectivity in the New Field of Contemplative Studies

The new academic field of Contemplative Studies supplements the third-person academic model of the critical study of texts through the contexts of culture and history with an equal emphasis on the critical study of the experiences embodied in these texts via first-person epistemology, supported by scientific research on meditation. At the core of this first-person epistemology is a new approach to critical subjectivity derived from modern Zen Buddhist philosophy and practice. These will be presented and detailed in the lecture.

Harold D. Roth is professor of religious studies and founding director of the Contemplative Studies Initiative at Brown University. He is a specialist in Chinese philosophy and textual analysis, the classical Daoist tradition and a pioneer of the academic field of Contemplative Studies, in which he created the first Bachelor’s degree program at a major research university in North America. He has written and/or edited nine books and more than 50 scholarly articles in these areas including Original Tao (Columbia, 1999), a translation and analysis of the oldest text on breath meditation in China; “Against Cognitive Imperialism,” (Religion East and West, 2008), a critique of conceptual bias in Cognitive Sciences and Religious Studies; The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China (2010) (with 3 other scholars), the 139 BCE Daoist compendium long considered the last great untranslated work of classical Chinese thought; and The Contemplative Foundations of Classical Daoism (2021), a collection of his scholarly articles on this topic. He is also the compiler and editor of Manifesting Zen: Master Dharma Talks from Mt. Baldy, a collection of teishos on the foundational Chan work, the Linjilu (Jp.: Rinzai roku) by Zen Master Kyōzan Jōshū Rōshi (Sasaki: 1907-2014).

Discussant Sarah Shaw

Dr. Sarah Shaw read Greek and English, at Manchester University, where she did a doctorate in English literature. After studying Pali and Sanskrit at Oxford University, she began to conduct research on Pali literature, particularly jātakas, texts concerned with meditation, and modern practice. She is a member of Wolfson College and the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford. She is also a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies.

Her books include Buddhist Meditation: an Anthology of Texts, Routledge (2006);

Jātaka Stories: Birth Stories of the Bodhisatta (2006); co-authored, with Naomi Appleton, The Ten Great Birth Stories of the Buddha: the Mahānipāta of the Jātakatthavaṇṇanā Silkworm Books, Thailand/University of Washington Press (2015); Mindfulness: Where it Comes From and What it Means, Shambhala (2020) and The Art of Listening: A Guide to the Early Teachings of Buddhism, Shambhala (2021). She has just edited a posthumous book by her teacher, L.S. Cousins, Meditations of the Pali Traditions: Illuminating Buddhist Doctrine, History, and Practice, Shambhala (2022). A frequent visitor to South and Southeast Asia, she lectures and writes on Buddhist subjects.

About the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series:

Launched in September, 2021, the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series (印證佛學傑出學術系列講座) is a collaborative, multi-university partnership between Peking University, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Inalco (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales), Princeton University, Harvard University, and the University of British Columbia. The Lecture Series is established in honour of Venerable Cheng-yen 證嚴, founder of Tzu Chi, and her mentor Yinshun 印順 (1906–2005), with the goal of promoting topics in Buddhist Studies.

The lecture will be in person and live-streamed via YouTube with simultaneous English and Mandarin channels.

Pali Texts Reading

5, 12, 19 May and 2, 16 June 2.30-4:00pm via Teams

The Pali reading class was set up to read texts that require certain types of technical knowledge (such as traditional grammar, vinaya, Abhidhamma, or material culture) and/or which do not have a published edition or translation, as well as to support those working on an edition or translation or seeking to understand a particular text for their research. It meets online on Fridays (except those Fridays where key members have other commitments).

Please contact [email protected] or [email protected] if you would like to join this group or have a text you would like to read with this group.

University of Oxford Glorisun Lecture Series in Buddhist Studies 2022-2023 & Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture 2023

Trinity Term 2023

Lecture Room 1 at 5:00pm  

Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies  
Pusey Lane 
Oxford, OX1 2LE  

All Welcome  

Tea and snacks at 4:15 – 4:45pm (Common Room in the basement)  

All enquiries: [email protected]      

24 April 2023

Donna Marcus Duke ‘Identity without Essence’: Self and gender in the Soreyyatheravatthu

1 May 2023

Thomas Borchert  

Barami and Bureaucracy: Mechanisms of Monastic Power in Contemporary Thailand 

15 May 2023

Angela Chiu 

Antiquities Looting in Southeast Asia 

22 May 2023

Laurence Cox and Brian Bocking 

Researching colonial Buddhist history from below – Irish-Burmese monk U Dhammaloka, subaltern perspectives and plebeian movements  

29 May 2023 The Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series (印證佛學傑出學術系列講座)Julia Shaw (Associate Professor, University College of London, UK) Buddhism, ecology and place-making: an archaeological perspective

5 June 2023 

Harold Roth (to be confirmed) 

Other than the 29 May Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture, all lectures are kindly supported by Glorisun Global Network for Buddhist Studies. 

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].