‘Visionary Realms: An Interview with Robert Beer’. 2011. [PDF at Wisdom books or online (more pictures).]
Nice to see these informed musings on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Newar art by Robert Beer, its most accomplished Western exponent, ranging from the influence of Botticelli’s Nascita di Venere upon it to thoughts on some of its current leading lights.
There is also a plug for Robert Beer’s joint venture with Wisdom books, the commercial site tibetanart.com, offering stuff at the higher-quality end of the market.
Gudrun Bühnemann. ‘The Buddha’s (Return) Journey to Lumbinī (lumbinīyātrā).’ Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens vol. 54 (in press; to appear in November 2011).
Prof. Bühnemann’s upcoming presentation of selected findings in Nepal was announced today on sanskritbuddhism:
According to Newar Buddhists, Śākyamuni Buddha visited his birthplace Lumbinī after his enlightenment. Depictions of this journey became popular in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Nepal. They show the Buddha riding standing up on a snake while being attended by Hindu deities in service to him. The scene, known as the lumbinīyātrā, is represented in numerous paintings and in wood and metal work, and is also described in texts. This strand of the Buddha legend is specific to Newar Buddhism and not attested in Indian biographic or hagiographic accounts of the Buddha’s life. In this paper I will trace the history of the lumbinīyātrā theme by examining descriptions in texts and artistic representations. I will then discuss elements of the yātrā which are also found independently in other contexts. In conclusion, I will offer some thoughts on the significance of the lumbinīyātrā theme.
Fredrik Liland. ‘The transmission of the Bodhicaryāvatāra: The history, diffusion, and influence of a Mahāyāna Buddhist text’. M.A. thesis, Universitetet i Oslo, 2009. [official site/PDF] Supervised by Jens E. Braarvig.
From the Abstract
The thesis is concerned with the 7th Century Mahāyāna Buddhist text Bodhicaryāvatāra (BCA) and its significance as a vehicle for cultural exchange. We trace its history in India and beyond, from its proposed author Śāntideva’s hand, its contemporary influence in India, and its impact in the lands—Nepal, Tibet, China, Mongolia, and beyond—and languages—Sanskrit, Newari, Tibetan, Chinese, Mongolian, and others—where it travelled. The nature of its influence has varied with the times and places where it has found itself, but in all instances it received a prominent place of canonical status, and was mostly revered.
[…]
The BCA has received quite a lot of attention in modern scholarship since the first publication of a critical Sanskrit edition by Minayev in 1889. A large number of new manuscripts of the text have surfaced since then, and a separate chapter is dedicated to philological concerns and the dire need for a new and updated version that will take into account also the new knowledge we now have of the text[‘]s history. A mostly unnoticed commentary, the Bodhicaryāvatāra-ṭippaṇi, also receives i[t]s long overdue attention in this chapter.
Liland’s thesis presents a long over due bibliographically-oriented update to scholarship on the Bodhicaryāvatāra. Two other scholars are said to have been recently working on a critical edition of the text: Daniel Stender and Richard Mahoney. I do not know whether either are proceeding.
One stand-out feature of Liland’s thesis is the attention it pays to Nepalese sources and translations in the Newar (“Newari”) language, which, as regular readers know, are routinely neglected in Buddhist studies, notwithstanding the fact that they originate in direct contact with the Sanskrit original in a South Asian Buddhist setting. Despite this unusual but welcome development, I can point to at least three areas of further improvement:
“Ratna Bahādur Vajrācārya (1893-1955), of whom not much is known” (p.92): in fact, at least four (mostly short) biographies of this outstanding figure are in print, including a dedicated and independently published treatment by Manish Shakya.
No mention of (the many) translations into South Asian vernaculars; here’s one in Nepali. Not all such translations were done from Sanskrit, but some have been.
No reference to manuscripts in private or recently documented collections.
Katharina Maria Lucia Weiler. ‘The Neoclassical Residences of the Newars in Nepal: Transcultural Flows in the Early 20th century Architecture of the Kathmandu Valley’. PhD diss., Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, 2009. [abstract / PDF (40 MB)]
Almost as good as being there, this lavishly illustrated dissertation treats an important architectural subculture of the Kathmandu Valley. Weiler looks closely at the stylistic origins of buildings built by people who wanted to emulate Europe, while remaining tantric Hindus and Buddhists at heart. This lucid description of a relatively recent strand in the rich tapestry of Newar urban life is commended to aficionados of Nepalese taste. Nike of Samothrace and Śrī yantra at Ananda Niketan
Pandit Vaidya Asha Kaji (Ganesh Raj Vajracharya); Michael Allen, ed. The Daśakarma Vidhi: Fundamental Knowledge on Traditional Customs of Ten Rites of Passage Amongst the Buddhist Newars. Kathmandu: Mandala Book Point, 2010. 191 pp. ISBN: 9789994655144. [official site (ordering details)]
From the blurb:
The daśakarma begin with the birth ceremony (jaṭābhiṣeka) and end in the ceremonial initiation of the Supreme Seniormost or Head of the Community (cakreśvarābhiṣeka). The system of the daśakarma is so instilled in the life of every Buddhist Newar that the rites have become part and parcel of the life-cycle, thus presenting as inseparable traditional and cultural rites unique among human beings on earth. […]
Asha Kaji Vajracharya (1908–1992) was one of twentieth-century Nepal’s most respected Buddhist figures. Having cultivated the traditional learning of a pandit, he became renowned in his native Lalitpur as an Ayurvedic doctor, tantric practitioner and raconteur of Buddhist lore. He published over thirty books, many of which were translations or commentaries based on Sanskrit originals, and opened up his own manuscript collection to photography by the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project. He advised and collaborated with a number of foreign scholars, and became the first Newar master to teach the Buddhist tradition of the Kathmandu Valley outside Asia, touring Japan at his students’ request, and bestowing initiation into the cycle of Cakrasamvara upon a non-Newar couple for the first time in the modern era. […]
Michael Allen was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1928. He received his B.A. degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin in 1950 and his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the Australian National University in 1965. He was appointed to a lectureship in Anthropology at Sydney University in 1964 and retired as Professor in 1993. ln addition to his extensive fieldwork on Newar society and religion, conducted mainly between 1966 and 1978, Professor Allen has also carried out anthropological research in Vanuatu (1958–82) and in lreland (1988–96).
Giuseppe Tucci Symposium, Monash University (Caulfield), 2010
The Giuseppe Tucci Symposium jointly convened in Melbourne by Monash University, IsIAO and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura over September 29 to October 1, 2010 has successfully concluded. In my estimation, the quality of presentations was quite high, with a great deal of new material coming forth regarding Giuseppe Tucci’s life, times and scholarly legacy.
Two volumes of proceedings are planned. In the meantime, a foretaste is available in the booklet of the abstracts in downloadable PDF form.
* Royal, James F. Buddhism and the Production of American Cool. PhD Dissertation, University of Florida, May 2010. [PDF]
Keanu Reeves as Siddhartha Gautama
Today there is no shortage of people in the Western hemisphere who identify as Buddhist. At the same time, there is a remarkable absence of the Buddhist mainstream transmitted in Sanskritic texts and institutions in the West. Have you ever wondered why it is so hard to find anything like the pan-Indian tradition in your neck of the woods? More to the point, just how Buddhist are the icons of Buddhism which have sprung up in North America and elsewhere?
Such questions rarely receive the attention they deserve in the literature on self-styled Western Buddhism. Now, I am pleased to say, a new dissertation by James F. Royal* sheds light of unprecedented brilliance upon the Western milieu.
One of Royal’s main claims is that much of the Buddhist presence in the West is less about putting Buddhism into practice in a new context than about neutering and undermining it. Buddhism is made to align with the notion of cool, which Royal defines as:
a key guiding motif in the marketing of postwar and then post-Cold War consumer culture for middle-class America.
An ideology of renunciation becomes a quest for personal aggrandisement; ego-denial becomes ego-affirmation. This redefinition of Buddhism is enacted and encouraged by a number of high-profile media players:
American films and advertisements of the last 20 years have taken the religion as a sign of Otherness that itself seems to promote consumption and America’s technological lineage of control.
In his dissertation, Royal examines not only the teachings but the motives of such figures as:
…Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose use of Buddhism for capitalist-imperialist ends set the stage for the work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. […] later uses of the religion, in 1990s film and 2000s advertisement, show a Buddhism that is more overtly procapitalist, a move that reflects America’s identity crisis in the post-Cold War, especially in its relationship with China, but also Asia generally.
While Royal also examines self-styled Buddhists who “ostensibly provided a critique of capitalism”, his overriding concern is to show how
the discourse of cool has tried to appropriate seemingly subversive elements back into the capitalist fold.
Although I have not yet seen Dr. Royal’s dissertation in full—an extract was kindly provided—I expect that it could become a landmark in our understanding of how Buddhism is made to appear in the West, and more generally, how it is subverted to carry out the ends of modern consumerism.
Abstract (part): One of the most remarkable facets of capitalism is its ability to incorporate disparate, even antithetical, systems into its ever-enlarging sphere of influence, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries as technology makes the world interconnected. To make such a transformation, consumer capitalism has employed a discourse of ‘cool’ to rein in potentially threatening figures and ideologies and bring them back into the circuits of consumption. Especially ripe for analysis is the incorporation of Buddhism, since the creed is the fastest-growing of the world religions in the U.S. The key moment for its mobilization, the 1950s, occurred during a period of escalating tensions with communism, in which a flourishing consumer capitalism was touted as the way to defeat the U.S.S.R. During this period, representations of Buddhism entered pop culture as a challenge to mainstream consumerism. Yet, now representations of Buddhism support consumer capitalism, for instance, in ads and films. Thus, this dissertation seeks to understand how seemingly antithetical discourses can promote the proliferation of capitalism, and how political and capitalist imperatives can motivate representations of a foreign religion. This dissertation examines postwar figures who have used Buddhism in their cultural productions, although it highlights writers from earlier periods who framed Buddhism for later adoption.
The role of religion in fomenting conflict in the late twentieth century period is the focus of a new dissertation by Mark Yeisley:
Yeisley, Mark Owen. The End of Civilizations: The Role of Religion in the Evolution of Subnational Conflict, 1946-2007. PhD diss.: Duke University, 2010. PDF: D_Yeisley_Mark_a_201005.pdf.
NB: A detailed catalogue of the collection was published by Kimiaki Tanaka 田中公明: 『詳解河口慧海コレクション―チベット・ネパール仏教美術』, 佼成出版社, 1990) [OCLC: 673702954; amazon.co.jp].
