Buddhist Manuscript Traditions Across Asia

Merits of the Book: Buddhist Manuscript Traditions across Asia

For some two millennia, throughout much of Asia, the Buddhist religion has promoted the arts of the book as a primary means for preserving and diffusing its scriptural legacy together with many other fields of learning. Recent decades have seen an upsurge of scholarship devoted to the manuscript traditions of the major Buddhist cultural areas, but relatively little comparative work aiming to explore the possible relations among them. The Merits of the Book: Buddhist Manuscript Traditions Across Asia invites scholars working on the culture of the book in different parts of the Buddhist world—including India, China, Japan, and Tibet—to begin a collective conversation. In conjunction with The Merits of the Book, a workshop on Tibetan manuscripts will be held to advance the project, A Manual of Tibetan Manuscript Studies, based at the University of Chicago Divinity School, with the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation and projected for publication by the Cornell University Press.

Details of the program can be found here (click for PDF).

February 26-28, 2015

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Keynote address: “In Praise of Error: What Can We Learn from Mistakes in Buddhist Manuscripts?”

by Prof. Richard Salomon, University of Washington
4:30pm, Thursday, Feb. 26, Swift Lecture Hall (3rd floor)
Reception to follow

Friday, February 27, 9am,-12:30 and 2-5:30,
Saturday, February 28, 9am-12:30pm
Franke Institute for the Humanities, Joseph Regenstein Library

Sponsored by the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion, the Luce Foundation, the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS), the Committee on Chinese Studies of the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS), the Committee on Japanese Studies of the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS).

 

 

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Participants:

Richard Salomon
University of Washington (keynote speaker)

Brandon Dotson
University of Munich

Agnieszka Helman-Wazny,
University of Arizona/University of Hamburg

Gregory Heyworth
University of Mississippi

Jinah Kim
Harvard University

Bryan Lowe
Vanderbilt University

Sam van Schaik
British Library

Michael Sheehy
Tibetan Buddhist Research Center

Stephen F. Teiser
Princeton University

Stacey van Vleet
University of California, Berkeley

Vesna Wallace
University of California, Santa Barbara

Jeff Wallman
Tibetan Buddhist Research Center

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For more information, please contact Jetsun Deleplanque at  jkd@uchicago.edu

Organized by Matthew Kapstein, Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies, in association with the University of Chicago Buddhist Studies faculty members Dan Arnold, Steven Collins, Paul Copp, James Ketelaar, Christian K. Wedemeyer and Brook A. Ziporyn.