Continuing my irregular series on the presence or lack thereof of anything to do with early Buddhism in US Buddhist studies, may I present the latest list of panels sponsored by the Buddhism Unit for the upcoming American Academy of Religions conference, the largest interreligious conference in the US.
Ever since I attended, I’ve been getting the mailouts and noticed a curious detail. As I said seven years ago:
there is not a single topic that deals with anything that happened in the first 500 years of Buddhism. Nothing on the suttas, on the Vinaya, on Ashoka, on the emergence of the schools, or on anything else that might actually have anything to do with the founder of Buddhism, his historical context, his teachings, or his students.
Why stop there? Let’s do Islamic studies without the Koran. And Christian studies without the Gospels. And Jewish studies without the Torah.
Every serious student of Buddhism should have read all the suttas and the Vinaya and be well versed in them. There is no excuse. They should also have a proper grounding in early Buddhist philosophy and practice on a historical and text-critical basis. They should be aware of the evolution of the schools and the impact of Ashoka. Without a grounding in the fundamentals of the field, all that’s left is empty theoretical posturing that does nothing more than chase the tail of academic fashions.
Poaching Textual Authority: The Reception of the Bhikṣuṇī-vinaya (A19-209)
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM, Convention Center-111 (Street Level)
Scholars working to foreground the experiences of monastic women across Buddhist contexts are creating greater gender representation within the discipline of Buddhist Studies. A key factor in female Buddhist monasticism is the legal tradition governing women’s communities, or the Bhikṣuṇī-vinaya. This panel engages this foundational legal tradition and, especially, its reception across a variety of contemporary and historical contexts. Whereas commentarial studies presume the fealty of commentary to an authoritative root text and privilege questions of continuity and orthodoxy, a reception-oriented approach shifts the scholar’s focus to the varied experiences of voices, bodies, and cultures receiving the tradition. This panel highlights how Bhikṣuṇī-vinaya receivers approach the text as what Michel de Certeau referred to as “tacticians.” The four papers in this panel will explore the tactical hermeneutics employed by reception communities drawing upon the authority of the Bhikṣuṇī-vinaya but reading the tradition selectively as they engage in social experimentation.
Reiko Ohnuma, Dartmouth College, Presiding
Manuel Lopez, New College of Florida
"Divergent Lives, Convergent Paths: Ordination, Education, and Social Status of Contemporary Bhutanese Nuns”
Darcie Price-Wallace, Northwestern University
"Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhist Nuns’ Textual Communities in Northern India: On the Foundational Women’s Ordination Narrative”
Nicholas Witkowski, University of San Diego
"Buddhist Monastic Women as Conduits of Charismatic Authority: A Study of Revolutionary Agency and Counterrevolutionary Reception”
Annie Heckman, University of Toronto
"Counting to 180: Butön Rinchen Drub’s curation of nuns’ pāyantikā offenses from the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya(s)”
Amy P. Langenberg, Eckerd College, Responding
Performing Time in Buddhist Literature: Creative Re-imaginings of Past, Present, and Future
Sunday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM, Convention Center-107 (Street Level)
Buddhist literature throughout time has danced between multiple temporalities, inducting its audiences into narratives that presence the past, predict the future, and transcend both. The narratives of crisis and catastrophe rampant in our contemporary moment offer a unique opportunity to call into question a liberal secular vision of linear, progressive time as a norm, and instead to look to alternative temporal framings as a way to re-imagine our relationship to past, present, and future. Our panel explores temporal plays in Buddhist writings as a resource to transform narratives of catastrophe. Our topics span from creative interpretations of the nidāna “At one time,” to affective responses of joy as a way to rewrite the past and future, to narrativizing the moment of straying into samsaric existence as a continual expression of gnosis, to ritual performances of the Heart Sūtra as an inter-religious performance of unity in the aftermath of disaster.
Chenxing Han, Institute of Buddhist Studies, Presiding
Elaine Lai, Stanford University
"Straying into Samsaric Time According to Heart Essence Literature”
Sinae Kim, Princeton University
"When is “One Time” (yishi 一時)?”
Adam Miller, University of Chicago
"(Re)Writing the Past (and Future) through Joy: The Story of Māra in the Precious Banner Sūtra”
Shayne Dahl, University of Lethbridge
"The Heart Sutra in Contemporary Japanese Mountain Asceticism”
Natalie Gummer, Beloit College, Responding
Business Meeting
Reiko Ohnuma, Dartmouth College, Presiding
Bryan Lowe, Princeton University, Presiding
Methods, Theories, and Disciplinary Formations in the Study of Buddhism
Sunday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM, Convention Center-Mile High 4A (Lower Level)
How do our methodological choices challenge (or perpetuate) established understandings of Buddhism? Reflecting on the future of Buddhist Studies, the Collective Buddhist Studies Manifesto has called for the expansion of the theoretical and methodological parameters of the field in order to center neglected and marginalized perspectives. Last year’s AAR panel on privilege in Buddhist Studies and in Buddhism considered the ways in which institutional, disciplinary, and identity-based hierarchies shape not only careers but also the production of knowledge. Both of these conversations explored aspects of disciplinary formation in Buddhist Studies and called for revitalization through greater methodological pluralism and institutional inclusivity. This group of scholars, working across historical periods and geographical contexts, answers these calls by offering concrete examples of how new research areas make new methodological approaches necessary, and, equally, how the intentional application of diverse methodologies creates new ways of knowing Buddhism.
Jessica Zu, University of Southern California, Presiding
Panelists
Amy P. Langenberg, Eckerd College
Ann Gleig, University of Central Florida
Wendi Adamek, University of Calgary
Nalika Gajaweera, University of Southern California
Kai Shmushko, Tel Aviv University
Victoria Montrose, University of Southern California
Author Meets Critic: Reading Matthew King’s In the Forest of the Blind (Columbia University Press, 2022) for Decolonizing Buddhist Studies (co-sponsored with Chinese Religions Unit)
Sunday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM, Convention Center-107 (Street Level)
What does a “critical Buddhist studies” look like? Matthew King responds to this question with his experiment in “anti-field history.” In the Forest of the Blind is a study of the nineteenth and twentieth-century circulation through Europe and Inner Asia of the Foguo ji, the account of Faxian’s fifth-century travels to Buddhist sites in South and Central Asia. Incorporating Chinese, French, Mongolian, and Tibetan sources, this book provokes conversations across linguistic, regional, and temporal boundaries. King shows how Inner Asian authors transformed Orientalist renderings of Faxian’s account through such diverse lenses as Qing world historical order, emergent nationalisms, and the Tibetan refugee experience. These lenses were themselves also transformed. The panelists respond to questions such as: What does it mean to emphasize “negative space and absence” over “impact or influence” in the historical approaches to Buddhist worlds? How can “circulatory” histories contribute to decolonial, deimperializing, and deorientalising scholarship?
Rae Dachille, University of Arizona, Presiding
Panelists
Gray Tuttle, Columbia University
Sangseraima Ujeed, University of Michigan
John Kieschnick, Stanford University
Alexandra Kaloyanides, University of North Carolina
Matthew King, University of California, Riverside, Responding
Sonic Dharma: Chanting and Reciting in the Global Buddhist Landscape
Monday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM, Convention Center-107 (Street Level)
Chanting and recitation are central Buddhist cultivation practices. Invoking the Buddhist Dharma as a sonic practice plays an important role for Buddhists of most traditions. Scholarship on chanting exists within a variety of disciplinary contexts. Scholars, for example, study chanting from a textual perspective, focusing on the recited texts and their doctrinal meanings, or apply an ethnomusicological approach, considering musical theory, sonic patterns and experiences. The panel builds on existing scholarship by bringing perspectives informed by textual analysis, ritual theory, music theory, raciolinguistics and ethnography into dialogue. In doing so it aims to overcome the common dichotomy of textual and social-scientific approaches to the study of Buddhism. It thus takes series the content as well as the context of chanting, thereby providing a more comprehensive picture of this important Buddhist practice, while also exploring the diverse ways in which chanting and recitation shape the global Buddhist landscape
Rongdao Lai, McGill University, Presiding
Sara Swenson, Dartmouth College
"Murmurs and Yelps: Buddhist Ethical Soundscapes in Vietnam”
Miroj Shakya, University of the West
"Overcoming Poverty: The Tradition of Recitation of the Vasudhārā Dhāraṇī in the Newar Buddhist community of Nepal”
Funie Hsu, San José State University
"Paying Homage: Reciting, American Racial Formation, and Asian American Buddhists”
Jens Reinke, Leipzig University
"Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form? Chinese Mahayana Chanting in Translation”
Alex Grabiner, McGill University
"The Call of Bell and Drum: Ritual Structures and Innovations in Chinese Buddhist Liturgy”
Legacies of Violence: Trauma, Buddhism, and our Collective Bodies (co-sponsored with Buddhist Philosophy Unit)
Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM, Convention Center-107 (Street Level)
At this pivotal moment in the transformation of Buddhist Studies, a time when scholars are examining and challenging forms of privilege and oppression within the field, it is necessary to open to new methodological and theoretical tools–tools that can meet the complex matters before us. In our panel, Legacies of Violence: Trauma, Buddhism, and our Collective Bodies, we contend that working with Buddhist thought alongside Black feminist thought, Indigenous feminist thought, and transgender theory can allow us to forge more nuanced understandings of trauma, violence, and resistance within Black, transgender, and Indigenous Buddhist bodies and collective communities.
Kevin Buckelew, Northwestern University, Presiding
Panelists
Ray Buckner, Northwestern University
Rima Vesely-Flad, Warren Wilson College
Natalie Avalos, University of Colorado
Kali Cape, University of Virginia
Sara Lewis, Naropa University
New Work in Buddhist Studies
Tuesday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM, Hyatt Regency-Granite B (Third Level)
This panel highlights exciting new work in Buddhist Studies by graduate students. The first paper looks at the categories Mahāyāna and Theravāda in modern China and situates this distinction in the historical deployment of a contested differential for nationalistic projects. The second considers Atiśa Dīpaṃkara’s role in the later spread of Tibetan Buddhism and shows that Atiśa believed that monastics could engage in ostensibly sexual tantric practices by replacing them with internal yogic methods. The third assesses vegetarian discourse in Mahāyāna texts and argues that a body that smelled like meat signified bodily impurity, which reflected negatively on the character and spiritual attainments of a practitioner. The fourth analyzes The Lamp Which Clarifies the Origin of the Treasures (gter ‘byung gsal ba’i sgron me) by the 15th-century treasure revealer, Ratna Lingpa and challenges existing scholarship that identifies gter ma as an entirely Tibetan phenomena.
Bryan Lowe, Princeton University, Presiding
Caiyang Xu, Columbia University
"How ‘Chinese’ is Mahāyāna? The Formation of the Mahāyāna Distinction in 20th century China”
Patrick Lambelet, University of California, Santa Barbara
"The Great Lord Reconsidered: Atiśa Dīpaṃkara and the Taming of the Tantras”
Marielle Harrison, University of Chicago
"The Stench of Meat: The Olfactory Repercussions of Meat Consumption in Mahāyāna Buddhist Texts”
Heather Moody, University of Virginia
“The Tibetan Treasure Tradition in the Light of Ratna Linpa’s Lamp”
Best, KhBh
Hmmmm well it does seem like there’s something important to be learnt here, but I can’t quite put my finger on what that may be… Something about EBT enthusiasts venting to other EBT enthusiasts in an EBT corner of the Buddhist internet about not being included by the bigger Buddhist community?
