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When:
November 20, 2019 @ 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
2019-11-20T16:00:00-05:00
2019-11-20T17:30:00-05:00
Where:
Rackham Amphitheatre
First Annual Luis Gómez Memorial Lecture | Why Are Buddha Statues So Big? Space, Time, and Human Bodies in Buddhism
Reiko Ohnuma, Chair and Professor of Religion, Dartmouth College
Taking the ordinary human body as a baseline, Buddhist authors sometimes chose to imagine the human body in an exaggerated way, on a scale utterly beyond the realm of human experience. Human bodies that extend through space until they reach the ends of the universe; human bodies that contain everything in the universe; human bodies whose individual body-parts are multiplied until they reach almost-infinite numbers; human bodies whose lifespans stretch throughout eons of time to approach eternity—all of these constitute Buddhist examples of using the human body as a “corporeal code” by means of which human beings give voice to that which is immaterial, unimaginable, and otherwise unfathomable. This talk will examine the Buddhist use of human bodies on a non-human scale to give voice to immaterial and otherwise hard-to-conceptualize entities.