Dear UCLA Center for
Buddhist Studies Listserv Members:
We hope you can join us
for these two upcoming events.
With best wishes,
CBS Staff
Through
the Eyes of Another: Visions of Arhats in Song-Dynasty China
Talk
by Phillip E. Bloom, Indiana University, Bloomington
Crafted between 1178 and 1188 for ritual use in a small temple
near Ningbo, the one hundred hanging scrolls of the Five Hundred Arhats (Daitokuji, Kyoto, Japan)
possess a striking peculiarity: more often than not, the set’s eponymous
semi-divine monks are simply shown gazing. They gaze at natural wonders, they
gaze at supernatural feats performed by their peers, they gaze at episodes from
the mytho -history
of Buddhism, and most importantly, they gaze even at paintings. How are we to
understand these scrolls’ insistence on acts of viewing, and how might Song
worshippers have responded? Through their practice of gazing, do these arhats
merely model
for us how we ought to look, or are other motivations at work? To make sense of
the multiple forms of spectatorial engagement facilitated by these scrolls,
this presentation will bring them into dialogue with contemporaneous poems that
describe imaginative acts of entering painted worlds and with liturgies that
prescribe the performative inhabitation of other subject positions. Drawing on
such texts, I shall argue that the Five Hundred Arhats and other works of Song Buddhist
art seek to create possibilities for intersubjective experience—for viewing the
world through the eyes of an awakened other.
Phillip E. Bloom is Assistant Professor of East Asian Art History in the Department of Art History at Indiana University, Bloomington. He specializes in the history of Song-dynasty Buddhist art and ritual. His work has recently appeared in The Art Bulletin and ArsBuddhica
(Bukkyō geijutsu ),
and he is currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled Nebulous Intersections: Ritual and Representation
in Chinese Buddhist Art, ca. 1178.
Phillip E. Bloom is Assistant Professor of East Asian Art History in the Department of Art History at Indiana University, Bloomington. He specializes in the history of Song-dynasty Buddhist art and ritual. His work has recently appeared in The Art Bulletin and Ars
Sponsor(s): Center for Buddhist Studies, Center for Chinese Studies
http://www.international.ucla.edu/buddhist/event/12402http://www.international.ucla.edu/buddhist/event/12402
And a very special
one-day conference
The
Indian Roots of Global Buddhism
A
one-day conference on the Indian origins of Buddhism.
10:00 Welcome Remarks (Monica L. Smith, Professor, UCLA Department of Anthropology and Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair in Indian Studies)
10:10 Religious Studies at UCLA (Carol Bakhos, Professor, UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; Director, UCLA Center for the Study of Religion
10:20 Buddhist Scholarship In Los
Angeles (Robert Brown, Professor, UCLA Department of Art History; Curator of
South and Southeast Asian Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art).
10:30 Robin A.E.Coningham
(Professor and UNESCO Chair in Archaeological Ethics and Practice in Cultural
Heritage, Durham University)
“Archaeology,Pilgrimage
and Tradition: Excavating Lumbini and the Natal Landscape of the Buddha”
11:15 Jason Neelis (Associate Professor, Department of Religion and Culture, Wilfred Laurier University)
10:30 Robin A.E.
“Archaeology,
11:15 Jason Neelis (Associate Professor, Department of Religion and Culture, Wilfred Laurier University)
“Endangered Signposts of Buddhist
Transmission: Upper Indus Petroglyphs and Inscriptions"
12:00-1:15: Lunch
1:15 Robert D. DeCaroli (Professor, Department of History and Art History, George Mason University)
“Snakes and Gutters: Buddhist Rainmaking in Art and Text"
12:00-1:15: Lunch
1:15 Robert D. DeCaroli (Professor, Department of History and Art History, George Mason University)
“Snakes and Gutters: Buddhist Rainmaking in Art and Text"
2:00 Shahnaj Husne Jahan (Professor and Director of the Center for Archaeological Studies, University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh)
“Re-visioning the Buddhist Landscape of Bangladesh”
2:45 Hannah Bloch (Digital Editor, National Public Radio)
“On the Journalistic Trail of Buddhist Heritage in Afghanistan: The Case of Mes Aynak”
3:30 M.B. Rajani (Assistant Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore)
“Buddhist sites in India: Geospatial Insights Into Their Past and Future”
4:15 Ross Davison (Production Lead, CyArk.org)
“Utilizing Reality Capture Technology for Rapid Damage Assessment: Recent Research on Buddhist Myanmar”
5:00 Closing Remarks (Gregory Schopen, Professor, UCLA Asian
5:15 - 6:30 Reception
Sponsor(s): Center for Buddhist Studies, Center for India and South Asia, Program on Central Asia, Anthropology, Cotsen Institute
of Archaeology, Center for the Study of Religion,
Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair in Indian Studies