New Voices in Buddhist Studies

The West’s use of the orientalist term “Lamaism” to describe Buddhist traditions across East and Inner Asia has been problematized by many since the 1960s. From Peter Bishop to Donald S. Lopez Jr., scholars have critically reflected on the West’s creation of the “myth” and “prisoners” of Shangri-La. Building upon their critiques and those of Asian scholars such as Shen Weirong, Kōmoto Yasuko, and Jian Jinsheng, this paper suggests new ways to reconsider the trope of “Lamaism” from analyzing non-Western forms of colonial discourses on religion, namely, through the perspectives of the Republic of China (1912-1949) and the Japanese Empire (1868-1945). Not simply a comparative exercise, this paper combines perspectives from modern China and Japan to show how transnational discursive practices competed to place, historicize, consume, ally with, Other, discipline, and know religion in disputed territories sandwiched between expanding Chinese, Japanese, Soviet, and British colonialisms in a post-Russo-Japanese War landscape.

On June 23, 2022, the 70th Je Khenpo, Tulku Jigme Chodrak, at the request of the king of Bhutan, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, and in an event organized by the Bhutan Nuns Foundation, conducted a bhikṣuṇī ordination to 144 nuns, restoring the Mūlasarvāstivāda female lineage in the Himalayan tradition. It is difficult to understate the importance of this event since, by most accounts, bhikṣuṇī ordination had never been introduced to Tibet or Bhutan, and nuns have only had access to novice status since the introduction of Buddhism in the region in the 7th Century. The goal of this paper is to discuss how this ceremony and the newly achieved bhikṣuṇī status has impacted the lives of Bhutanese nuns and nunneries. In order to do that the author has interviewed several newly fully ordained nuns, and leaders at the Bhutan Nuns Foundation, and visited some of the nunneries affected by this change.

Dharmakīrti’s theory of apoha played an extraordinarily significant role in the development of epistemology in premodern India. It is curious, then, that several of Dharmakīrti’s first millennium commentators leveraged his apoha in social metaphysical debates with Hindu interlocutors to argue against the claim that the caste system is a natural hierarchy of human kinds. By putting Dharmakīrti and one of his commentators, Prajñākaragupta, into conversation with Ásta, a contemporary social metaphysician whose theory of social construction resonates with apoha in interesting ways, this paper takes seriously the idea that apoha is relevant to questions concerning social categories, particularly caste. By focusing on perception as a central component of the construction of social kinds for both apoha and Ásta’s ‘conferralist’ account, it explores the ways in which these theories compliment and push back on each other. Additionally, it considers how such a comparison further illuminates Dharmakīrtian anti-caste arguments.

This paper explores how stories about the Lotus Sūtra’s textual transmission contributed to its popular reception in medieval China. In his early-eighth-century work Fahua zhuanji or Records of the Transmission of the Lotus Sūtra, scholar-monk Sengxiang weaves lore regarding the scripture’s written manifestations and their journeys to China into a larger narrative explicitly intended to stir the public into faith. Recent scholarship on the Fahua zhuanji has focused on its later chapters, whose miraculous tales of Lotus Sūtra worship in China demonstrate how the touted powers of the scripture were verified and reinscribed among its medieval audience. Such approaches neglect how Sengxiang generates wonder out of the Lotus Sūtra’s history. As this paper argues, devotion to the scripture among medieval Chinese Buddhists was substantiated not only by lore of its miraculous powers in the present, but also through an affectively charged education in the history that brought them to China.