We
are pleased to announce these upcoming events. Please check the CBS website for
speakers bios and updated information.
http://www.international.ucla.edu/buddhist
We look forward to seeing you soon.
With best wishes,
CBS Staff
***
Ritual in Shifting Space: Monastery Layout of the Three Kingdoms
Youn-mi Kim, Assistant Professor, Yale University
Monday, April 20, 2015
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
275 Dodd Hall
UCLA
As Buddhism was transmitted to the Three Kingdoms of Korea between the fourth and sixth centuries, this foreign religion brought in new types of art and architecture to the Korean peninsula. The pagoda, the exotic multi-story monument that enshrined Buddha’s relics, changed the skyline of the three kingdoms. The golden hall that enshrined Buddhist images provided a new religious space for worshipping the Buddha and performing various rituals. Focusing on changes in the layout of Buddhist monasteries in the Three Kingdoms, this talk will trace shifting ritual practices that accompanied the spatial change in monastic plans. This talk will also demonstrate the importance of archaeological remains and epigraphic records of studying Buddhist practices of Three Kingdoms.
Co-sponsored with the Center for Korean Studies
***
Being a Corpse the Buddhist Way: Scenes from a Singaporean Chinese Mortuary
Ruth Toulson, University of Wyoming
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
243 Royce Hall
UCLA
The Singaporean world of death is in the midst of a revolution. In the span of a generation, funerals have been simplified, “traditional” mourning garb has vanished, cremation has replaced burial, and ancestral altars have been removed from family homes. Drawing on fieldwork in Hokkien, Hakka, and Teochew funeral parlors, where I worked as an embalmer,
She argues that these changes are part of a larger, politically orchestrated shift to mutate the form taken by religious belief itself, transforming a Daoist-infused obsession with ancestors, into a sterile, more easily controlled, “Protestant” Buddhism. In this lecture I consider what prompts this emergent Buddhization of Chinese religion. Do shifts in orthodoxy signify shifts in orthopraxy? And what does it mean to be a corpse in a Buddhist way?
Cosponsored with the Center for Chinese Studies, Asia Institute, Center for the Study of Religion
***
Daoist Terms in Early Chinese Buddhist Translations? A Reappraisal
Jan Nattier (Independent Scholar, Hua Hin, Thailand)
Friday, April 24, 2015
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
243 Royce Hall
UCLA
It is commonly held that when Buddhism first arrived in China, this foreign religion was understood--or rather, misunderstood--through a Daoist conceptual lens. Early Buddhist translators, so the story goes, made free use of Daoist terminology, creating confusion that was only cleared up centuries later, when Kumārajīva and his colleagues began to eliminate such terms from Buddhist discourse. According to this scenario, Chinese Buddhist translations followed a clear trajectory of "progress," with the inappropriate choices made by early translators being rectified in the more careful work of their successors.
Prof. Nattier will examine some of the indigenous religious terminology used during the first two centuries of Buddhist translation activity in China and show that the actual pattern of usage is much more complicated--and much more interesting--than the simplistic picture of the early appropriation, and subsequent abandonment, of "Daoist" terminology would suggest.
***
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.
***
Peter Gregory colloquium talk
Title TBA
Friday, May 15, 2015
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
11377 Bunche Hall
UCLA
Please check the CBS website for updated info.
***
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.
http://www.international.ucla.edu/buddhist
We look forward to seeing you soon.
With best wishes,
CBS Staff
***
Ritual in Shifting Space: Monastery Layout of the Three Kingdoms
Youn-mi Kim, Assistant Professor, Yale University
Monday, April 20, 2015
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
275 Dodd Hall
UCLA
As Buddhism was transmitted to the Three Kingdoms of Korea between the fourth and sixth centuries, this foreign religion brought in new types of art and architecture to the Korean peninsula. The pagoda, the exotic multi-story monument that enshrined Buddha’s relics, changed the skyline of the three kingdoms. The golden hall that enshrined Buddhist images provided a new religious space for worshipping the Buddha and performing various rituals. Focusing on changes in the layout of Buddhist monasteries in the Three Kingdoms, this talk will trace shifting ritual practices that accompanied the spatial change in monastic plans. This talk will also demonstrate the importance of archaeological remains and epigraphic records of studying Buddhist practices of Three Kingdoms.
Co-sponsored with the Center for Korean Studies
***
Being a Corpse the Buddhist Way: Scenes from a Singaporean Chinese Mortuary
Ruth Toulson, University of Wyoming
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
243 Royce Hall
UCLA
The Singaporean world of death is in the midst of a revolution. In the span of a generation, funerals have been simplified, “traditional” mourning garb has vanished, cremation has replaced burial, and ancestral altars have been removed from family homes. Drawing on fieldwork in Hokkien, Hakka, and Teochew funeral parlors, where I worked as an embalmer,
She argues that these changes are part of a larger, politically orchestrated shift to mutate the form taken by religious belief itself, transforming a Daoist-infused obsession with ancestors, into a sterile, more easily controlled, “Protestant” Buddhism. In this lecture I consider what prompts this emergent Buddhization of Chinese religion. Do shifts in orthodoxy signify shifts in orthopraxy? And what does it mean to be a corpse in a Buddhist way?
Cosponsored with the Center for Chinese Studies, Asia Institute, Center for the Study of Religion
***
Daoist Terms in Early Chinese Buddhist Translations? A Reappraisal
Jan Nattier (Independent Scholar, Hua Hin, Thailand)
Friday, April 24, 2015
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
243 Royce Hall
UCLA
It is commonly held that when Buddhism first arrived in China, this foreign religion was understood--or rather, misunderstood--through a Daoist conceptual lens. Early Buddhist translators, so the story goes, made free use of Daoist terminology, creating confusion that was only cleared up centuries later, when Kumārajīva and his colleagues began to eliminate such terms from Buddhist discourse. According to this scenario, Chinese Buddhist translations followed a clear trajectory of "progress," with the inappropriate choices made by early translators being rectified in the more careful work of their successors.
Prof. Nattier will examine some of the indigenous religious terminology used during the first two centuries of Buddhist translation activity in China and show that the actual pattern of usage is much more complicated--and much more interesting--than the simplistic picture of the early appropriation, and subsequent abandonment, of "Daoist" terminology would suggest.
***
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.
***
Peter Gregory colloquium talk
Title TBA
Friday, May 15, 2015
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
11377 Bunche Hall
UCLA
Please check the CBS website for updated info.
***
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.
