Date

Venue

Presenter

Topic

4/11

11/11

18/11

26/11

27/11

ONLINE

John Powers, Deakin University

Lecture 1. The Contested Middle: Tibetan Debates Regarding How to Understand Madhyamaka

Lecture 2. Can Ultimate Reality Change? The Three Natures/Three Characters Doctrine in Indian Yogācāra and Its Modern Interpreters

Lecture 3. What’s Wrong with Studying Texts? Current Debates in the Field of Buddhist Studies

Tibet’s Rivers and Climate Change: How Events in a Remote Area Affect Australia And the World

Reading the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra: What Was the Buddha Really Thinking?

ONLINE

John Powers, Deakin University

Tibet is one of the most significant global hotspots for climate change. Often referred to as the “third pole” because its glaciers hold the third largest reservoirs of fresh water on the planet, the Tibetan Plateau is warming at four times the global average, and its glaciers are melting at a rapid pace. This has implications for Australia, the Asia Pacific, and for much of the rest of the world. Hydrological patterns that begin in glaciers in the west of the Plateau follow the course of Tibetan rivers, which ameliorate their effects. They then descend into India and Southeast Asia, where they determine the amount and intensity of the rains of the Southern Monsoon. The monsoon ends its progress in northern Australia and peters out in the Outback. The vagaries of these weather phenomena also affect the Southern Oscillation, which in turn determines how much rain Australia receives in a given year. This presentation will focus on a research project funded by the Australian Research Council that aims to produce an environmental history of Tibet’s hydrological past, focusing on some of its main rivers. It also considers water management across the Himalayas and how it varies from region to region. Clearer data on the environmental past can serve as a comparator for present trends: are there past events that are pertinent to the current situation? Have there been similarly dramatic climate shifts that can be discovered from scientific studies and literary sources? The project takes an innovative approach to such questions: it brings together a team comprising scientists (two climate scientists and a surfacewater specialist), anthropologists, historians, and philosophers. The goal is to develop a large data set from past accounts (including historical treatises, autobiographies, religious works, and travelogues) that is correlated with scientific studies (ice deposits, sediment samples, tree ring analysis, pollen, etc.) that can be used to develop a more complete and robust vision of Tibet’s environmental past than what has been attempted to date.

27/11

ONLINE

The Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra (Discourse Explaining the Thought) is the main scriptural source for the Yogācāra (Yogic Practice) school, one of the two main philosophical traditions of Indian Buddhism. It consists of ten chapters, each of which features a tenth level bodhisattva who poses questions to the Buddha regarding qualms that have arisen among his followers regarding apparently contradictory statements attributed to him. They ask: “Blessed One, on one occasion you said X; on another you said not-X. What were you thinking when you made these pronouncements?” The responses are nuanced and often brilliant doctrinal reformulations, and chapter seven provides a hermeneutical strategy for making sense of all of the Buddha’s disputed statements. The sūtra is also the locus classicus for a number of influential doctrines, including “cognition only” (vijñapti-mātratā), the three natures/three characters (trisvabhāva/trilakṣaṇa), the foundation consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna), and what may be the earliest extant discussion of the problem of evil from a Buddhist perspective. In these sessions, we will engage in close reading of some of the most doctrinally significant sections of this influential text; we will also examine relevant passages in the canonical commentaries to see how these passages have been interpreted by the tradition that developed from the sūtra.

ONLINE

This paper aims to investigate the unique philosophies and historical significance of the emerging Abhidharma commentarial literature (Buddhist ‘metaphysics’) within Tibetan meditation dominated (‘yogic’) traditions of the 15th to 17th century. To that end this research will analyse three key commentaries from scholars of the Kagyü school of Tibetan Buddhism in context and ask the following questions: Why did yogic traditions that were well established and had produced generations of accomplished adepts feel a need to engage in intensive commentary on scholastic materials that were widely regarded as of merely provisional importance and associated with lower ranked philosophical traditions such as the Abhidharma? (By that time, the Madhyamaka was regarded by all Tibetan Buddhist orders as the supreme philosophical system.) Was it an attempt to ground meditation in fundamental tenets common to all Indian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions? Was it for reasons of religious/political prestige? Or did the engagement with scholastic and epistemological materials do significant work for meditators?