Date

Venue

Presenter

Topic

31/3

USYD

Peter Jackson, ANU

State-Sponsored to Market-Based: Buddhism as Commodity and the Rise of Magic in 21st Century Thailand

Throughout its history in Thailand, Theravada Buddhism has had an intimate relationship with the state. In the late 19th and early- to mid-20th centuries — first under the absolute monarchy and then, after the 1932 revolution, under elected governments — the state sponsored a modernist vision of Thai Buddhism as a rationally based religion linked to various projects of expanding mass education and promoting constitutional government and economic development. At three key junctures across the 20th century, the state imposed new secular bureaucratic structures upon the sangha, showing the importance that political leaders placed on harnessing the Buddhist monkhood to state-defined projects. However, since the early 1990s, and increasingly so since the turn of the millennium, the Thai state has shown growing disinterest in orchestrating the national structure of Buddhism, retreating from its historical role as sponsor of the religion and guarantor of the moral purity, and hence sanctity, of the monkhood. At the same time, the Thai economy has continued to grow rapidly and consumerist lifestyles have become the norm for large sections of the population. Thai Buddhism has continued to thrive and — at least in material terms — prosper across this two-decade period of dramatic social and economic transition. However, in the 21st century the modernist vision of Buddhism as a rational, even scientific, doctrine has been increasingly challenged by the rise of highly commodified practices linked to a range of supernatural beliefs that have only a tangential relationship to doctrinal Theravada Buddhism. In this paper I consider the rise of magically inflected commodified forms of Buddhist ritual practice and belief in early 21st century Thailand, and reflect on the challenges that this phenomenon poses for Thai Buddhists who continue to see their religion in more “traditional” doctrinal terms.

6/4

USYD

John McRae, Stanford

New evidence for the life and thought of Bodhidharma, founder of Chinese Zen

It has long been known that the hagiography of Bodhidharma (d. ca. 530), the putative founder of Chinese Chán or Zen Buddhism, evolved radically over time. Indeed, the incredible fluidity of that hagiography has led at least one scholar to suggest that there is no discernable beginning point to the process of legendary fabrication, and that there are no kernels of biographical truth that might be derived from the earliest sources.

In this presentation I will re-evaluate the earliest evidence for Bodhidharma’s religious identity and thought. It turns out that looking closely and with a fresh perspective at the earliest sources allows us to make important inferences regarding Bodhidharma’s historical contributions and those of his immediate disciples. In the process, we will answer the questions of whether Bodhidharma came from Central Asia or southern India, how two of his most important successors both lost a hand to amputation, and how the core philosophical structure of the Two Entrances and Four Practices (the only text potentially attributable to Bodhidharma) relates to contemporary Chinese Buddhist thought and the eventual growth of Chinese Chán/Zen.

The jataka story of the Bodhisattva Sadaprarudita (literally meaning “Ever Weeping”), the most well known version of which is found in the Astasahasrika prajñaparamita sutra, is an interesting story that has been used in different ways in various Buddhist traditions that flourished in India, Central Asia, China and Tibet. For example, the story is quoted and discussed in quite a few commentarial works in Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan and it is found in the Prasannapada by Candrakirti, the Siksasamuccaya by Santideva, and the works attributed to Marpa, Milarepa, Gampopa, Rechungpa, Tsongkhapa. In some works Sadaprarudita is presented as the paragon of one who searches for pajñaparamita, and in others he is the model for those who desire to serve their gurus. In China, moreover, during the early stage of the Pure Land tradition, Sadaprarudita was regarded as the preeminent exemplar of one practicing buddhasmrti (recalling the Buddha). This paper will examine the story of Sadaprarudita as it is preserved in different sources, and will address its significance and the possible reasons for its employment.

24/8

USYD

Reading seminar

Discussion on the two articles “Shaven Heads and Loose Hair: Buddhist Reflections on Sexuality” and “Candrakīrti on the Medieval Military Culture of South India” by Karen Lang.

7/9

USYD

Judith Snodgrass, UWS

The World’s Parliament of Religions revisited: Japan’s contribution to modern global Buddhism

This is a test run of the paper I have been invited to present at a workshop on Modern Buddhism at the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, in October this year. It revisits the presentation of Eastern Buddhism by the Japanese delegation in Chicago 1893 and their introduction of distinctively Mahayana Buddhist concepts to the Western discourse. While the Parliament has a well-established place in the history of modern Buddhism, this is largely because of the history of Zen in the West. The standard narrative therefore focuses on the one paper presented by Rinzai Zen master, Shaku Soen, its impact on American philosopher, Paul Carus, which in turn opened the way for D T Suzuki’s long and influential career in the formation of Western Zen. Important as it is, this is only one stand of a much more complex encounter. It was not Zen the delegation planned to present but the more encompassing Eastern Buddhism, and the features of Eastern Buddhism they attempted to convey have remarkable resonance with the characteristics of modern global Buddhism as we now know it. We know, however, from histories of Buddhist modernity such as David McMahan’s recent work, that the connection is far from direct. The aim of the paper is not, therefore, to claim priority for the delegation, but to reflect on the discursive processes at work in the formation of modern Buddhism.

Apologies to anyone who has read my book Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Columbian Exposition, (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). There are definitely overlaps. The material is, however, revisited in the light of recent work.

The site known as Baoshan (Treasure Mountain) in Henan reveals a complex web of practices, connecting images and texts, male and female and lay and ordained practitioners, humans and non-humans. Presenting the site through carved images and memorial inscriptions from the sixth and seventh centuries, Dr. Adamek traces lines of movement that connect the devotional constructions of the site. Drawing from Timothy Ingold’s notion of environment as a networked “taskscape,” she discusses Baoshan as a “practicescape,” a reinscription of the environment in Buddhist terms. The intersecting concepts of practice, escape, and landscape provide a lens through which to examine the aspirations and activities that structured the practitioners’ lives.

Buddhism possesses a largely hazy history in India. What we imagine archaeology and textual analysis has demonstrated satisfactorily is in a constant state of revision and how Buddhism appeared ‘on the ground’ often seems to bear little relation to what texts and monuments tell us. The 17th century Tibetan Lama Tāranātha offers us an interesting example of how Buddhism may be recreated or revised according to one’s own requirements.

In this paper I will demonstrate the process by means of which this happened in the 17th century, Tibet’s most turbulent period. The times were marked by the demise of ancient Tibetan families and their important patronage for Buddhism, the looming of civil war, the continued input into Tibet of Indian religious figures and the effective end of pilgrimage to Buddhism’s holy sites in India. In these uncertain times the young Tāranātha was faced with a choice: either remain a precocious yet insignificant monk or find an effective means of becoming a holder of a new and potentially attractive form of Buddhism which would secure him a safe and elevated position.

The paper will discuss the manner in which Tāranātha ‘re-constituted’ Indian Buddhism in this extremely late period, how he focussed on certain aspects and not others and will offer first-time analyses of several of the texts he claimed were the very latest tantric technology from an India in which Buddhism was still alive.

Indian folk-tales commonly feature the motif of the dohala: the unreasonable, unstoppable cravings of a pregnant woman. When a woman expresses her wish, the man has no choice but to obey.

One might expect that, within the patriarchal context of Indic and especially Buddhist literature, such desires would be seen as evidence of the base and irrational nature of women. And this is indeed how the topic has been treated in Western studies of the motif.

However, there is a cycle of about 19 stories in tha Pali Jataka collection that show dohala in a strikingly different light. For these stories, the woman’s irrational desire, often arising from a dream vision, is the motivation for the man to overcome his boundaries and find a higher path. The outcome of these dohalas, when they succeed, is abundance and transcendence. It is this form of dohala that the Mulasarvastivada Vinaya attributes to Maya before she conceives the Buddha.

The process whereby Buddhism assimilated the Hindu gods and goddesses has been well documented. This process, however, was not merely one of absorbing these deities into the Buddhist pantheon to act as guardians of the Dharma. There are other layers of assimilation that perhaps are not so familiar. In Buddhist rituals involving Hindu divinities there is a recurrent theme of the reversal of the roles played by benign and malignant beings in the Hindu epics. In Buddhist rituals of subjugation evil demons are invoked to subjugate the very same gods and goddesses who the epics record as having conquered them. Another characteristic of the Buddhist rituals is the frequent recourse to the rhetoric of armed conflict and violent confrontation in thename of conquering non-Buddhist systems of belief. These themes are developed by reference to the Sanskrit mantras and seed syllables used in rituals of subjugation (kōfukuhō) practised in the Shingon School of Japanese Buddhism.

11/11

Monash

Peter Friedlander, La Trobe

Conflict and Peace in Buddhism

This paper examines Buddhist involvement in war and the apparent paradox inherent in this if Buddhism is seen as a world renouncing pacifist religion. I will look at Buddhist teachings on the sources of conflict and methods for conflict resolution in Buddhism. However, I will argue that whilst inner peace in the monastic community is to be maintained by acceptance of spiritual authority, in the secular state Buddhism has also always sanctioned the exercise of state power, including violence, or the threat of violence, in order to maintain peace in the world. In order to illustrate this I will explore Indian Buddhist models for the state and the sangha and how as Buddhism spread from India into East Asia the idea of Buddhist support for the state was influenced by its interaction with East Asian notions of kingship. I will conclude by exploring Buddhist involvement in wars in Sri Lanka, China, Korea and Japanese and this relates to contemporary Buddhist Peace Movements.