Date

Venue

Presenter

Topic

9/4

USYD

Venerable Galkande Dhammananda

Conflicts and wars create divisions among people, communities and nations. Such conflicts create deep wounds that need to be healed. Existing approaches to reconciliation identify people who were and are engaged with conflict in different ways, such as ‘victims’, ‘perpetrators’ and ‘bystanders’. When one group is identified as ‘victims’ then that identification leads to the phrase ‘giving justice’ to the victims. A part of the process of giving justice becomes identifying perpetrators and then bringing them before the law. Most of the time, perpetrators are members of the military who have a strong backing from the people. Further, this approach disconnects the majority of people from understanding their connection with the conflict because they are understood as bystanders who are different from the previously mentioned categories. 

There is need for an alternative, inclusive model of reconciliation that sees the interconnectedness of everyone in different ways and in different degrees. In this presentation, the conditional genesis theory of Buddhism is applied to understand the interconnected and inter-dependent nature of society. This approach prompts us to see beyond ‘victim’, ‘perpetrator’ and ‘bystander’ divisions. It encourages us to view all members of society as victims in different ways and to different degrees and, in the same manner, as perpetrators in different ways and to different degrees. If a conflict is understood to create the conditions to wound people, then, reconciliation can be understood as a process of healing. In such a scenario there will not be victims, perpetrators and bystanders, but wounded people and a process of healing that can lead to true reconciliation. Since everyone in a society that has experienced conflict are wounded in different ways and to different degrees, there cannot be ‘healers’ who are not affected by the conflict as well. All are part of the wounding process and, in the same manner, all are part of the healing process.

USYD

James Benn, McMaster University

In later Chinese Buddhism, one text above all others has been extolled for the profundity of its ideas, the beauty of its language, and its insight into the practice of meditation—this is the scripture popularly known as the Lengyan jing or Śūraṃgama sūtra. Because of conflicting evidence regarding its provenance, and because the text seems to owe so much to other sources, modern scholars have concluded that Lengyan jing is an apocryphal sūtra fabricated in China at the beginning of the eighth century. But perhaps this perspective on the Lengyan jing has impeded our understanding of its most important features? In this lecture, Professor Benn shall introduce and discuss the content and structure of the scripture and consider it as a Mahāyāna canon in miniature—a complete work that contains discrete elements of scripture, dharma analysis, and vinaya and provides a new and detailed map of Mahāyāna ontology and soteriology.

USYD

Pawo Tsuglak Threngwa is a well-known 16th-century scholar and historian who lived during the heyday of Tibetan scholasticism. As a student of the Eighth Karmapa and a teacher to the Ninth Karmapa, he was a figure of particular importance to the Karma bKa’ brgyud tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Although his overall impact was remarkable and his Tibetan religious history The Feast of the Wise (mKhas pa’i dga’ ston) is widely accepted as a significant, unique, and reliable source by Tibetan scholars and academics alike, his life and his writings are little studied. This presentation seeks to present his life with some unique episodes, major activities of his life, and a brief overview of his work.  

19/10

26/10

2/11

USYD

In four lectures, Associate Professor Jason Neelis will retrace a network for Buddhist institutional expansion, cultural exchange, administration, and trade between northern India and the northwestern borderlands between South Asia and Central Asia known in literary and epigraphical sources as the Northern Routes (Sanskrit uttarāpatha). There routes connected India with the Iranian, Mediterranean, and Chinese worlds via the famed Silk Route. Multiple arteries on a northwest–southeast axis connected the ancient heartland of Buddhism in northeastern India through the Ganges-Yamuna river doāb to Mathura, the Punjab, Taxila, Gandhāra, the Upper Indus region of northern Pakistan, and an ‘old road’ across the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan. Focusing on Buddhist archaeological, literary and epigraphical sources, this series will address the historical significance of the Northern Routes as an arterial network and connotations of the Uttarāpatha as a geographical-cultural term with polyvalent associations in order to contextualize early characteristics in the development of Buddhism.

Lecture 1: Emergence of Buddhism in ‘Greater’ Magadha and Kośala (Śrāvastī)

Lecture 2: Development of Buddhism in the Middle Countries (Madhyadeśa)

Lecture 3: Expansion of Buddhism in the Northwestern Borderlands (Taxila, Gandhāra, and Bactria)

Lecture 4: Long-Distance Transmission of Buddhism along the Upper Indus River