1. Call for Papers> AAR, 2017, Boston - Buddhism in the West Group
2. Lecture> D. Christian Lammerts to deliver the U of Toronto Burma Lecture, March 3, 2017
3. LECTURE> Numata Talks by Professor Chen-kuo Lin
4. Re: RESOURCE> Bucknell’s Sanskrit grammar tables for digital platforms
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Call for Papers> AAR, 2017, Boston - Buddhism in the West Group
by David McMahan
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Buddhism in the West Unit
Statement of Purpose:
This Unit seeks to:
• Provide a venue for new studies on Buddhism in non-Asian locales
• Facilitate communication and exchange between scholars working on Buddhism outside of Asia
• Offer a forum within which to collectively clarify the intellectual and methodological underpinnings of research on Buddhism in the West, and consider new possibilities in methods and approaches
Call for Papers:
This unit invites papers or session proposals on the following (but is open to other possibilities):
• Race, ethnicity, gender, cultural identity, and/or privilege in western Buddhist discourse
• Teaching Buddhism in the West: pedagogy, field site visits, thematic choices
• Buddhist meditation retreats, retreat centers, and/or programs
• Asian-American Buddhisms
• Buddhism and politics in the West
• Buddhist youth, generational shifts
• Buddhism and transnationalism
• Buddhism and secularism
• For a possible co-sponsored session with Bioethics and Religion, papers concerning bioethics theory or practical issues involving Buddhism in the West
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Lecture> D. Christian Lammerts to deliver the U of Toronto Burma Lecture, March 3, 2017
by Christoph Emmrich
Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Southeast Asia Seminar Series and
Center for South Asian Studies at the Asian Institute
Munk School of Global Affairs
A Lecture in the Arts, Histories, Literatures, and Religions of Burma
D. Christian Lammerts (Rutgers University)
Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, c. 1250–1850 CE
Friday, March 3, 2017
4:00 – 6.00 pm
Department for the Study of Religion
Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street, Room 318
The legal history of Burma over the course of the second millennium CE offers a series of literary, juridical, and intellectual contributions that are unique when considered in relation to the wider Buddhist world of South, Central, and East Asia. From the 13th through 19th centuries upper Burma was a regional center for the production of a distinctive genre of Buddhist legal literature known as dhammasattha ("treatise on law"), whose laws claimed jurisdiction over all members of society, including monks and laypersons, and kings, commoners, and slaves. Prose and verse dhammasattha texts were composed in Pali and vernacular languages (Burmese, Mon, Arakanese, Shan, etc.), as well as in bilingual gloss versions (nissaya), and there is extensive testimony, dating from the mid-13th century onward, for their utilization by judges in contexts of dispute resolution. Aspects of the early history of this genre can be gleaned from lithic epigraphy, vernacular poetry, and bibliographic catalogues (piṭakat samuiṅḥ), although surviving dhammasattha treatises, transmitted in palm-leaf and paper manuscripts, can be dated no earlier than circa 1637, whereas the youngest examples of the tradition were written under British colonialism around 1900. For the past decade Christian Lammerts has been involved in the first major study of this genre—its textual histories, laws, and shifting modes of reception and jurisprudence—on the basis of extensive fieldwork in Burma and close investigation of the epigraphic corpus and manuscript archive, which preserves hundreds of discrete texts in multiple, sometimes highly variant, versions. In this presentation Lammerts will discuss the results of this project, drawn from his forthcoming book, Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, c. 1250–1850 CE (University of Hawai'i Press).
D. Christian Lammerts is Assistant Professor of Buddhist and Southeast Asian Studies at Rutgers University. He is interested in the cultural and intellectual histories of Buddhism and religious law in Burma and Southeast Asia, and is currently at work on a study of juridical curses, oaths, and ordeals around of the Bay of Bengal from the late first millennium CE up to the early colonial era. His publications may be accessed via http://rci.rutgers.edu/~DCL96.
For information, please contact Christoph Emmrich at christoph.emmrich@utoronto.ca
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LECTURE> Numata Talks by Professor Chen-kuo Lin
by Wendi Adamek
The Numata Chair in Buddhist Studies at the University of Calgary is pleased to present:
Two Talks by Professor Chen-kuo Lin (National Chengchi University)
The Annual Leslie S. Kawamura Memorial Lecture
Gallery Hall, Taylor Family Digital Library, University of Calgary
Thursday March 9, 7-9pm
"Emptiness and Violence: An Unexpected Encounter of Nāgārjuna with Derrida and Levinas"
In this talk I will deal with the seeming contradiction between the ideas of emptiness and violence. The question is: how is the issue of violence accounted for in terms of the philosophy of emptiness? The first step of the investigation is to look into how violence is presented in hagiographical narratives about the murders of Nāgārjuna, Āryadeva, and Kamalaśīla in the Mādhyamika Buddhist tradition. Then I will try to see how violence is tacitly treated in Mādhyamika philosophy, while Levinas and Derrida will be taken as interlocutors in order to bring to the surface some hidden insights. The reason why I place Nāgārjuna and Levinas/Derrida together is that all of them show their distrust toward metaphysics of “the same.” They all try to find the exit, the opening space, by which the oppression in metaphysics of identity may hopefully be overcome.
Colloquium, Department of Classics and Religion
Social Sciences 541, University of Calgary
Friday March 10, 3-5pm
“Vasubandhu’s Theory of Memory: A Reading Based on the Chinese Commentaries”
Professor Chen-kuo Lin (National Chengchi University)
In this talk I will take an exegetical approach to the philosophical issue of memory treated in Vasubandhu’s Refutation of the Theory of a Self (Ātmavādapratiṣedha), an appended chapter in the Treasury of Knowledge (Abhidharmakośa), and Twenty Verses on Consciousness-Only (Viṃśikā). Unlike Janet Gyatso’s edited volume, In the Mirror of Memory in 1992, which is indeed a milestone for its studies on the theory of memory (smṛti) in the tradition of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, this lecture deliberately reads these texts from the perspective of Chinese commentaries composed by Puguang (普光, d. 664) and Kuiji (窺基, 632-682), two eminent disciples of Xuanzang (602-664). The main thrust in this paper is to show how Vasubandhu argues against certain forms of the realist theory of memory, claiming that memory can be explained without presupposing the existence of the self (ātman) and the external world. This study concludes that an internalist turn taken by Vasubandhu in the Abhidharmakośa and the Viṃśikā might foresee the memory argument in Dignāga’s theory of self-awareness.
Chen-kuo Lin 林鎮國 is a Distinguished Professor in both the Department of Philosophy and the Graduate Institute of Religious Studies at National Chengchi University. He earned Ph.D. from Temple University in 1991. His research interests includes Buddhist philosophy (Buddhist logic and epistemology, Mādhyamika, Yogācāra), Chinese philosophy (Neo-Confucianism, Daoism), and comparative philosophy. Currently he is conducting two research projects, “Cognition and Mind: A Study and Annotated Translation of Huizhao’s Treatise on Two Means of Valid Cognition” and “The Encounter of Chinese Buddhists with Indian Yogācāra Texts: A Comparative Study of Indian and Chinese Commentaries on Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses (Viṃśikā).” In addition to several book chapters and journal papers, he published three books: Emptiness and Modernity: From the Kyoto School, Modern Neo-Confucianism to Multivocal Hermeneutics (Taipei: New Century Publication, 1999); A Passage of Dialectics (Taipei: New Century Publication, 2002); and Emptiness and Method: Explorations in Cross-Cultural Buddhist Philosophy (Taipei: The NCCU Press, 2012). All are in Chinese. Recently, A Distant Mirror: Articulating Indic Ideas in Sixth and Seventh Century Chinese Buddhism, co-edited with Michael Radich and published by the University of Hamburg Press, is accessible online at http://blogs.sub.uni-hamburg.de/hup/products-page/publikationen/125/.
Posted by:
Wendi Adamek
Numata Chair in Buddhist Studies
Department of Classics and Religion
University of Calgary
2500 University Dr. NW
Calgary, AB Canada T2N1N4
For more information call: 403-220-5886 www.ucalgary.ca/numatachair
To receive event notices, send an email to numatach@ucalgary.ca
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Re: RESOURCE> Bucknell’s Sanskrit grammar tables for digital platforms
by Bhikkhunī Dhammadinnā
Dear Colleagues,
our apologies, the announcement posted yesterday was premature, being the result of a miscommunication, and should be disregarded. It will still take some time before the digitised tables are ready to be released. I apologise for any inconvenience caused.
With kind regards,
Dhammadinnā
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