Our final events of the spring quarter are coming up and we look
forward to seeing you on campus.
CBS Staff
Broken Bodies: The Death of Buddhist Icons and Their Changing Ontology in 10th-12th Century China
Wei-cheng Lin (UNC Chapel Hill)
Friday, May 08, 2015
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
243 Royce Hall
UCLA
This presentation investigates a widespread practice of burying broken statues in a greater territory of China during the 10th through 12th centuries. As has been suggested, a broken “icon” could have been considered as a form of “relic,” thus to be buried, particularly, inside the pagoda crypt. If this were the case, it would entail some conceptual adjustments: the icon would need to first be considered alive so it could turn into a relic after death, that is, after it loses its physical integrity. Yet the incomplete icon did not die completely and, as will be argued, the breakage during the time of our consideration was only to prompt an ontological shift of the icon thereafter.
***
Bridging the Gap: Zongmi's Strategies for Reconciling Textual Study and Meditation Practice
Peter Gregory (Smith College, Stanford University)
Friday, May 15, 2015
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
11377 Bunche Hall
UCLA
There is a long-standing and deep-rooted tension between what could be characterized as meditative practice and textual study that runs through the Buddhist tradition. It emerges with the early communities, is manifested in different forms throughout the history of the tradition, and is very much alive today. This lecture will examine some of the ways in which this tension plays out in Zongmi’s most ambitious, original, and systematically articulated work, The General Preface to the Collected Writings on the Source of Chan (禪源諸詮集都序), written in 833. This work is most famous for its multifaceted attempt to reconcile what Zongmi describes as two camps pitted against one another: textual scholars and Chan practitioners. In this lecture I will look at two unexplored dimensions of Zongmi’s project: (1) his account of his own “enlightenment experience” that allows him to claim to speak authoritatively on the issue and (2) his account of how the transmission of the canonical teachings and the mind divide into separate traditions in Indian Buddhism.
***
Writing Buddhist Liturgies at Dunhuang: Hints of the Ritualist's Craft
Paul Copp (University of Chicago)
Friday, May 22, 2015
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
243 Royce Hall
Manuscripts surviving from the eastern Silk Road site of Dunhuang make possible, among many studies, close explorations of the ways Chinese Buddhists of the ninth and tenth centuries constructed ritual programs. This talk will examine three features of those constructions: the natures of the frames by which Buddhist cultic texts and objects--narrative scriptures, incantations, and talismanic seals--were made the focuses of devotional and therapeutic rites, the borrowings and adaptations of existing materials of which those frames were made, and the understandings of the nature of scriptural language implicit in these practices.
CBS Staff
Broken Bodies: The Death of Buddhist Icons and Their Changing Ontology in 10th-12th Century China
Wei-cheng Lin (UNC Chapel Hill)
Friday, May 08, 2015
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
243 Royce Hall
UCLA
This presentation investigates a widespread practice of burying broken statues in a greater territory of China during the 10th through 12th centuries. As has been suggested, a broken “icon” could have been considered as a form of “relic,” thus to be buried, particularly, inside the pagoda crypt. If this were the case, it would entail some conceptual adjustments: the icon would need to first be considered alive so it could turn into a relic after death, that is, after it loses its physical integrity. Yet the incomplete icon did not die completely and, as will be argued, the breakage during the time of our consideration was only to prompt an ontological shift of the icon thereafter.
***
Bridging the Gap: Zongmi's Strategies for Reconciling Textual Study and Meditation Practice
Peter Gregory (Smith College, Stanford University)
Friday, May 15, 2015
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
11377 Bunche Hall
UCLA
There is a long-standing and deep-rooted tension between what could be characterized as meditative practice and textual study that runs through the Buddhist tradition. It emerges with the early communities, is manifested in different forms throughout the history of the tradition, and is very much alive today. This lecture will examine some of the ways in which this tension plays out in Zongmi’s most ambitious, original, and systematically articulated work, The General Preface to the Collected Writings on the Source of Chan (禪源諸詮集都序), written in 833. This work is most famous for its multifaceted attempt to reconcile what Zongmi describes as two camps pitted against one another: textual scholars and Chan practitioners. In this lecture I will look at two unexplored dimensions of Zongmi’s project: (1) his account of his own “enlightenment experience” that allows him to claim to speak authoritatively on the issue and (2) his account of how the transmission of the canonical teachings and the mind divide into separate traditions in Indian Buddhism.
***
Writing Buddhist Liturgies at Dunhuang: Hints of the Ritualist's Craft
Paul Copp (University of Chicago)
Friday, May 22, 2015
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
243 Royce Hall
Manuscripts surviving from the eastern Silk Road site of Dunhuang make possible, among many studies, close explorations of the ways Chinese Buddhists of the ninth and tenth centuries constructed ritual programs. This talk will examine three features of those constructions: the natures of the frames by which Buddhist cultic texts and objects--narrative scriptures, incantations, and talismanic seals--were made the focuses of devotional and therapeutic rites, the borrowings and adaptations of existing materials of which those frames were made, and the understandings of the nature of scriptural language implicit in these practices.
