Sanskritic civilization · Tantric studies · Newar & Nusantaran Buddhism
Currently I have no plans to review Christian Wedemeyer’s Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism (2012), but that’s not to say that it shouldn’t be reviewed. Just a couple of months after its release, it is now on the shelves of over 80 libraries. Moreover, Dr. Wedemeyer promises to publish a minimum of three more volumes on the Śrīsamāja. Hopefully someone — who isn’t me — will soon get around to a review.
Björn Schwartz. ‘Re-enchanting China: Private Religiosities in the Media Field in Beijing’. M. A. diss., Lund University, 2012. 120 pp. [official site / PDF]
Most of us are familiar with the official picture of tantric Buddhism as a quaint bit of old hat. But who among the determiners of the West’s cultural priorities can admit that right now, the Vajrayāna competes head-on with Christianity as the preferred religion of the world’s next elite? Schwartz pierces the unreal construction of Buddhist Asia as a ball of cuteness, unleashing a torrent of dissonant keywords:
VIP religion, guanxi-networking, post-socialist subjectivity, clubbing as networking and status affirmation, field analysis, status, the emerging structure of entitlement, social change in contemporary China, the private media field in Beijing, conversion, Vajrayana Buddhism, christianity, housechurch, religious revival, emergent social hierarchy, private religions, secret social movements, the Christian field in China, the Buddhist field in China.
It’s not every day that philology determines the future of a superpower. November 12, 2000 CE, was just such a day. The outcome of the 54th United States presedential election hung in the balance, awaiting a manual recount of the Florida ballots. Officials were shown on television holding up punched ballots to the light, straining to determine whether their chads were dimpled or pregnant, or had hanging or swinging doors.
The officials’ process engendered doubt – doubt that could grow into a grey area which, left unchecked, might obscure entitlement and privilege itself. At this crucial juncture, former Secretary of State James Baker laid down his nation-changing methodological critique:
“How do you divine the intent of the voter on that voting card … with those little punch holes?” he said today on NBC’s Meet the Press. “You’re divining the intent of the voter with respect to whether it has two chads hanging down or whether it’s punched or whether it has an indentation? I mean, that’s crazy.” *
Textual critics were dismissed as diviners; textual criticism became an act of madness. The rest is history. But since history, especially bad history, loves nothing more than to repeat itself, the eve of the 57th presidential election provides an occasion to reflect on the value of philology.
Continue reading “Philology as national security threat”
Cecile Bründlmayer. Ethnography of the Kumbheśvara temple compound in Lalitpur (Patan), Nepal. Architecture, Iconography and Interaction within a sacred Landscape. Diplomarbeit, Universität Wien, 2011. 149 pp. [official site / PDF]
Anne Taylor Mocko. Demoting Vishnu: Ritual, politics, and the unmaking of Nepal’s monarchy. PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2012. 517 pp. UMI Number 3517176.
Guess what, theists? Animals have feelings too. That’s what Cambridge scientists are now confident in saying in the wake of the recent Francis Crick Conference. Science and reason are important in a modern society, so it just became that much harder to inflict scripturally sanctioned harm on sentient beings.
This reminds me of a discussion I once had in Germany. Prof. Schmithausen, you were right to think that something was up with theistic contempt for animals. The priests you knew may have been accurate on the detail – animals don’t have souls – but they were wrong on the big picture: they don’t either. Both humans and animals have “homologous subcortical brain networks” and share “primal affective qualia”. Every body hurts; and that suppressed observation was obvious long before it became a hipster anthem.
Long-time readers might remember this – now in print:
Yoshizaki, Kazumi (吉崎一美). The Kathmandu Valley as a Water Pot: Abstracts of research papers on Newar Buddhism in Nepal. Kathmandu: Vajra Books, 2012. 172 pp. ISBN: 9937506743. EAN: 9789937506748. USD$12.95. [official site]
[See Yoshizaki (1991), (1994a), (1994b), (1995), (1996a), (1996b), (1996c), (1997a), (1997b), (1997c), (1998a), (1998b), (1998c), (1998d), (1999), (2001), (2002a), (2002b), (2003a), (2003b), (2005a), (2005b), (2005c), (2007a) and several others.]
A new and ambitious font, Source Sans Pro, which has glyphs in the Latin Extended Additional codeblock (required for most Indological publishing in Unicode), was released by Adobe earlier this month.
Why ambitious? Because free, open source, high quality and produced by a stalwart of design in the digital era, all at once. Its letterforms riff on News Gothic, a typeface of enduring appeal. And it comes with an inspiringly comprehensive set of weights, from Extra Light to Black, and true italics. Anyone who knows what a proper font needs to have will know how rare and remarkable this is. Although it’s optimised for user interfaces, I’ve tested it in XeTeX and found that it works superbly. Here’s a snippet of how it looks, from the specimen:
What’s the catch? None other than the fact that just by using it and pulling apart the source, you might be more inclined to contribute to its development. A reason for releasing the font as open source (and hence free) is to demystify the increasingly complicated process of creating multiple-weight Unicode OpenType fonts, thereby encouraging the production and proliferation of fonts that meet contemporary standards. Open source lets all that complexity communally come to light, as Paul D. Hunt (and his commenters) reveal in Adobe’s official announcement of the font.
It’s downloadable from SourceForge.
Li, Shenghai 李勝海 [academia.edu]. ‘Candrakīrti’s Āgama: A Study of the Concept and Uses of Scripture in Classical Indian Buddhism’. PhD diss., University of Madison-Wisconsin, 2012. 311 pp.
This dissertation examines scripture as a concept and the various roles that authoritative Buddhist texts play as such in the intellectual history of Buddhism. While it considers what Buddhist authors explicitly speak about scripture, the project brings into focus the recorded uses of authoritative texts, with an interest in discovering intellectual practices and learning about the management and transmission of knowledge. The main source materials of this study consist of instances of scriptural references found in the scholastic and commentarial works of several influential Indian and Tibetan authors, all of whom are connected with the pivotal figure of Candrakīrti (ca. 570-640), whose major writings lie at the center of the investigation. […]
Highlighting a keen awareness of the problem of reifying reason displayed by certain Buddhist writers from the Madhyamaka School of thought, the dissertation argues more specifically that the Buddhist scholastic tradition is cognizant of the hermeneutical condition of understanding and of reason’s contingency upon language, context, and tradition.