Nov
20
Wed
Nov 20 @ 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
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.
Dec
5
Thu
Dec 5 @ 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
LRCCS Interdisciplinary Workshop | Competition or Complementation: Youxi Chuandeng’s Construction of Tiantai Identity and Tiantai-Chan Relation
Lang Chen, LRCCS Hughes Scholar
Discussant: Benjamin Brose, Associate Professor, Asian Languages and Cultures
Tiantai Buddhism is the first Buddhist school established in China and its legacy is still influential today. But it is usually considered “declined” in late imperial China and for this reason has not gained enough academic attention. This paper will examine some aspects of the Tiantai revival in the late 16th to 17th century, especially Youxi Chuandeng (1554-1628)’s construction of Tiantai identity and Tiantai-Chan relation, hoping to contribute to the discussion regarding the premodern usage of the term zongjiao (religion) and how Chinese religions were “syncretized.”
