Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

Ātmārāmajī Mahārāj (1837-1896) is the popular name of the Jain ācārya Vijayananda Surī, a Śvetāmbara Mūrtipūjaka Jain mendicant leader in the late 19th century. Ātmārāmajī saw the need for reforming Jainism in the western and northern parts of a colonized India in response to the growing influence of Hindu practices and ideals and to the aniconic sentiments of the Sthānakavāsīs (non-image worshipping Jains) and a contemporary Hindu reformation leader Dayānanda Sarasavatī (1824-1883) of the Ārya Samāj, a Hindu Indian reform movement. By exploring Ātmārāmajī’s The Chicago Praśnottara (1892-93) and Ajñānatimīra-bhāskara (1882) as well as his own autobiographical accounts found in various sources, this paper discusses how Ātmārāmajī navigated the tradition of the Jain mūrti-pūjā—practices associated with worshipping an icon that form the ritual praxis of particular Jain sects—through the modern period as part of his vision to reform Jainism in the modern period.

This paper discusses the role of technology in the dissemination and preservation of the teachings of Kānjī Svāmī (1890 – 1980). His religious career as an independent Jain leader began in the 1930s, delivering daily lectures on adhyātma, and most frequently on the Samayasāra of Kundakunda. I argue that the community’s use of technology and updating to the latest modes was significant in spreading these teachings into the modern age. Kānjī Svāmī was well-known for his oratory skills and never composed a single written work during his career. His followers certainly exploited the oral nature of Kānjī Svāmī’s teachings to great effect via audio recordings which began from the 1950s onwards using different analogue formats through to the digital age. Keeping pace with the latest technological trends and advancements allowed the preservation and transmission of oral content to audiences, which contributed to the successful growth of the movement.

This paper investigates the exegetical approach of Śvetāmbara Terāpanthi leader Ācārya Mahāprajña (1920-2010) in order to illustrate how a learned Jain mendicant leader adapted his exegetical style for a modern context. Mahāprajña’s commentary on the canonical text of the Ācārāṅga Sūtra or his Ācārāṅga-bhāṣyam reinterprets ancient Jaina descriptions of ascetic practice and proposes a new format for understanding scripture tailored for a contemporary audience. He strongly believed that it is difficult to understand Jaina canonical literature without understanding Vedic, Buddhist and Āyurvedic sources. He was explicit about the sources and constructive method of his modern exegetical practices, divorcing himself from the traditional approach set by the oldest commentaries of the Niryukti, which the poetic compositions of older Jain commentators followed. I argue that his reliance on an “end-note” type of commentary (ṭippaṇa),  rather than proposing a mere textual adaptation of the chosen text, redefined contemporary approaches to scriptural exegesis.

This paper will show how the learned Jain scholar-monk Jambūvijaya (1923-2009) opened the archives to the West while simultaneously revamping indigenous understandings of knowledge-preservation through his enormously successful cataloguing, scanning, copying, and digitizing efforts at the Jaisalmer bhaṇḍār or Jain manuscript libraries located at the Jaisalmer Fort in the Rajasthani desert. Western and Asian scholars, such as Daniel Ingalls, Paul Dundas, Nalini Balbir, Shin Fujinaga, John E. Cort, Maria Heim, and dozens of others, benefited from Jambūvijaya’s intellectual prowess, curiosity, and generosity from the 1950s onward. Jain studies, specifically, would not have advanced without his manuscript cataloguing work, critical editions, and independent writings. His willingness to use modern methods alongside traditional ones and engage local and international scholars opened the treasures of the Jaisalmer bhaṇḍār (and other Jain libraries) to the world. Despite such influence and output, there remain limited studies of his collective influence on Jain and Indological studies.

This presentation seeks to examine the social attitudes of the Śiva Bhakti tradition, known today as Vīraśaivism and Liṅgāyatism, in the Kannada-speaking region. The tradition’s positions toward marginalized groups in society, here referred to using the term “subaltern,” remain highly contested and undetermined, spanning from accusations of elitism that mirrors conservative Brahminism to social activism that rejects the legitimacy of the same assumed elitism (among the communities and in relation to the general society). The roots of this conundrum can be found in the Ragaḷe stories written by Harihara only a few decades after their deaths, in the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries. Referring to stories from a forthcoming publication of translations from corpus, the presenter will portray a complicated social picture in which one can find both stark rejections of conservative attitudes and excluding practices toward subaltern groups as well as support for religious elitism and exclusion.

Indian religious traditions are multidimensional and multi-layered. Though the Sanskrit texts often try to make Brahminical hegemony sacrosanct, some voices from the margins challenge exclusivity. Vernacular medieval *bhakti* poetry has provided a literary platform for the subalterns to articulate their grievances, express spiritual musings, and assert themselves.  Cokhāmelā and his family belonged to an untouchable caste in 14th-century Maharashtra, and their poetry records the discrimination and humiliation they faced. They are assertive about their identity as devotees of Viṭṭhala, the God at Phandarpur, as Cokhāmelā proudly says that he may be of lower caste, but his devotion is not in any way inferior. Given the socio-cultural situation of the medieval period, he could not free himself from the psychological fetters of the tradition altogether and found consolation in internalizing the doctrine of *karma*, which he believed to be responsible for his degraded position.

This paper explores devotional expressions in Stōtṛakṛitikal, a collection of devotional hymns composed by Mahākavi Kumāran Āśān (1873-1924), a member of a low caste in Kerala. These poems demonstrate *bhakti* imagined and expressed from a subaltern perspective. His *bhakti* implied union with the deity and “completeness.” The imagination of “completeness” for individuals concerned Āśān because he understood the “incompleteness” that lower caste people experienced through the practice of unapproachability and untouchability in Kerala during his time. This paper discusses the dynamics of devotion in some of Āśān’s devotional poems and argues how these poems embody love and surrendering to the deity and a sense of becoming “complete.” Though Āśān’s Stōtṛakṛitikal embodies the same motifs as those composed by upper-caste *bhakti* poets, it contributes to *bhakti* discourse, attesting that *bhakti* includes the voices of those on the margins of society, making the divine palpable, in Kerala.

As a half-male and half-female figure, Ardhanārīśvara has garnered significant academic attention. There is ample scholarship on its iconography, its place within poetry and mythological narratives, and its relationship to philosophical thought. However, content concerning the figure in living contexts is largely omitted. In this connection, academic works have hypothesized, theorized, and/or passingly referenced links between Ardhanārīśvara and peoples affiliated with “third gender” categorization but done little to investigate these purported connections further. To address these lacunas and shortcomings, I analyze Ardhanārīśvara within the devotional lives of related populations; this includes examining its incorporation into Durgā Pūjā festivities by gender and sexuality rights activists and its place within the Kinnar Akhāḍā, a “transgender religious order.” Accordingly, I demonstrate that Ardhanārīśvara is framed as having vindicating ties to tradition while also being innovatively advanced in the pursuit of upward social mobility by those aiming to rectify their marginalization.

This presentation makes an intervention in the study of *bhakti* (devotion) from the perspective of the Adivasis, the indigenous communities of India also classified as the “Scheduled Tribes.” This examination focuses on the study of the religious songs of the Bhils, i.e., the Adivasi communities of the Sabarkantha district of north Gujarat. Using archival and ethnographic data, this paper argues for the recognition of Adivasi tribal religions as a site for uncovering subaltern modes of *bhakti*. The paper includes the first-ever English translations of religious songs found in Bhili, an Adivasi language spoken in the hilly borderlands of Gujarat. The author presents a sample of four *bhajans* (devotional songs) sung by the Bhils in various ritual contexts, two of which were gathered during the author's ethnographic fieldwork spanning ten months over three visits and two others collected by Bhagwandas Patel, a scholar of Gujarati and Bhil literature at the Gujarat University in Ahmedabad.

This paper critically examines R. Gordon Wasson’s 1968 book, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, and traces its influence on both modern yoga and psychedelic research. A banker by trade, Wasson became fascinated with fungi and published a hugely influential article on the ritual use of psychedelic mushrooms in Life magazine in 1957. In 1968, he turned his attention to the enigmatic plant of the Vedas, Soma, arguing that it too was a hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria. Although largely discredited by Indologists today, Wasson’s identification of Soma with psychedelics helped solidify in the popular imagination an idea that was already present in Aldous Huxley’s work – namely, that psychedelics can occasion the same mystical states described in South Asian religious texts. With the recent renaissance of psychedelic research in the 21st century, this idea has resurfaced both in popular yoga literature and in many scientific studies of psilocybin, with some problematic implications.

Botanical candidates proposed for the authentic soma of ancient India have all too neatly followed modern drug trends—soma has become a sort of floating signifier of the Urpsychedelic. Aiming to disrupt the paradigm of soma scholarship, this paper shifts our gaze away from botany back towards soma’s primary domain: ritual. My focus is the Sāmaveda, a corpus of chants performed during the soma sacrifice, which attest many “non-lexical vocables,” sounds and phonemes with no semantic meaning. Does the high incidence of non-semantic speech in Sāmaveda correlate with the psychoactive profile of soma? This inquiry also provides a rich basis for cross-cultural comparison with the aesthetics of other psychedelic traditions. Nonlexical vocables occur in both the peyote songs of the Native American Church and the ayahuasca prayer songs of Amazonian shamanism; and traditional practitioners throughout the Americas report non-semantic phonemes in the speech of otherworldly entities they encounter.

The paper will argue that, prior to the apparent prominence of intoxicating cannabis in the early second millennium, the only intoxicant of any significance in South Asia was alcohol, betel being considered a fragrant digestive, datura used for nefarious means, and soma, however we understand it, never presented as a mind-altering substance in the Common Era. We examine experiences of intoxication according to the testimony of the religious agents under examination, without involving contemporary applications of intoxicating substances. We especially note the understanding that there were a range of intoxicating experiences caused by alcoholic drinks to demonstrate that modern notions of drunkenness are insufficient to account for the experiences detailed in the first millennium CE.

Transnational yoga traditions are playing an important role in the culture of the 21st century “Psychedelic Renaissance.” The bodily disciplines and contemplative practices associated with yoga have long been in the orbit of psychedelic science and culture—as a precursor to, a skill set within, and as an integrative method following psychedelic journeys and lifestyles. I argue that the “classical” framework for understanding power in yoga and in āyurveda with respect to the use of bioactive, if not psychoactive, herbs (oṣadhi) offers acute insights into contemporary psychedelic science and culture. These include 1) that yoga, historically, incorporated various endogenous and exogenous methods, paralleling the hybridity of modern, transnational yoga; 2) Pātañjala yoga philosophy provides a framework for understanding psychedelic experience that anticipates elements of psychedelic science; and 3) Contemporary descriptions of DMT-based psychedelic experience echo discussions of yogic experience by Larson and Grinshpon, with regard to “fantastic beings” and “near-death-experiences.”

Buddhists have been particularly successful in portraying the Buddhist Dharma as a nonviolent religion. As a result, some high profile scholars attempt to debunk the popular nonviolent image of Buddhism. While scholarship aiming to correct biases in the academic literature is important, in the classroom, scholarship that seeks to identify the violence tendencies of Buddhism, “New Religions,” cults, or other teachings also serves to invoke stereotypes of religion as violent, irrational, or superstitious. This paper presents the teaching methods of a class on Religious Conflict at a comprehensive private university operated by a Buddhist organization in Taiwan. The course curriculum both introduces the scholarship on religious violence in general, and Buddhist violence in particular, but also employs active learning pedagogy in the form of the Compassionate Listening Project curriculum to provide both examples of Buddhist nonviolence and opportunities for preemptive conflict resolution.

The topic of peace and nonviolence lends itself easily to a presentation of basic Buddhist teachings. Thanks to the writings and witness of Thich Nhat Hanh, such a presentation can utilize a combination of stories, poetry, discussion, and theoretical exposition, yielding a rich classroom experience with the potential to transform students’ understanding.

This paper presents the outline of a lesson with three segments, each of them escalating the level of challenge posed to the students. The first segment tells stories from Nhat Hanh’s own experience during the Indochina War and the Vietnam War. The second segment presents his reflection on the US military response to the September 11 attack of 2001. The final segment concludes with Nhat Hanh’s provocative poem, “Please Call Me by My True Names.”

How do student (and instructor) identity and positionality influence how we teach about Buddhism abroad? Likewise, what can this tell us about how we might make Buddhism courses taught in North America more accessible to students, especially at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs)? In this paper, I discuss the challenges and successes associated with recruiting and then guiding a group of historically under-resourced college students on a four-week Study Abroad intensive course in Ladakh, India. From initial recruitment to final project presentations, there are pedagogical, cultural, and religious aspects that must be considered (and reconsidered) when teaching Buddhism in a classroom of students who are BIPOC, come from low-income homes, and are the first in their families to attend college. While this paper focuses on the Study Abroad context – that is, experiential learning where students are invited to engage with the tradition _in situ_, and intensively over a short period of time – my experience working with this cohort abroad also has implications for how we approach teaching Buddhism in the North American classroom.

In 2019 this author demonstrated a model of Buddhist pedagogy that dovetailed with the mainstream academic movement contemplative pedagogy, offering promise in expanding American educational pedagogies with ideas of new epistemologies, dynamics, and languaging around why, how, and whom we educate. In 2019, this author proposed a young Buddhist graduate school, Maitripa College, as a nexus of investigation for such application, and the teaching of Buddhist Studies in its traditional and applied forms as a basis of understanding whether and how such pedagogy is effective. Four years later, this paper will summarize a critical analysis of this application thus far: through student evaluations of Maitripa College students, interviews with key college founders and friends from both inside and outside of traditional academia, and artifacts of student work, this paper will ask, and answer, the question: is contemplative pedagogy an effective medium through which to teach Buddhism in higher education?

The present research aims at investigating the characteristics of transnational exchanges of Chinese Christians and their socio-cultural impacts through the history of The Chinese Coordination Centre of World Evangelism (CCCOWE). CCCOWE is arguably the first transnational and interdenominational Chinese indigenized Protestant Christian organization. It has 75 district committees all over the world and is the most developed transnational Chinese Protestant Christian network. CCCOWE makes impacts on cultural-religious life of overseas Chinese Christian communities. CCCOWE as a religious movement alleviates theological and ancestral local divisions of overseas Chinese Christian communities. It also initiates Christian social participation in moral and environmental issues that many Chinese churches would like to avoid. With its activities and ministries, it becomes another religious power centre that exerts influence other than the traditional denominations and local church councils. The ministries of CCCOWE articulates and contributes additional complexity to the concept of Chinese identity.

As Chineseness keeps evolving beyond geographical boundaries, the face of Chinese Christianity has become more hybridized and ambivalent as it keeps being renegotiated in its socio-cultural context. Thus, there lies the need to understand the Chinese Christian diaspora experience that goes beyond resinicization or assimilation. In this paper, I propose looking at Chinatown as a socio-religious space that encapsulates this hybrid experience. Chinatown has become the space that symbolizes marginalization and exclusion as well as survival and resistance. After conceptually exploring the making of Chinatown, I will make a study case from Glodok Chinatown located in Jakarta, Indonesia. I identify three meanings that Glodok Chinatown signifies: migration, remembrance, and embrace. I then conclude by drawing theological implications from the Chinese-Indonesian Christian perspective, focusing on the ecclesiological identity as migrant, the church as the site of remembrance, and the call to embrace others.

Rev. Dr. Kao Chun-Ming (1929-2019) served as the General Secretary of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT) from 1970 to 1989 and actively participated in the democratization of Taiwan, the Republic of China (ROC), from the 1970s to 1990s. This paper aims to analyze two aspects of Kao’s public identity, Taiwanese and Christian, through Kao’s The Prison Letters and his two memoirs. This paper argues that Kao chose to emphasize the Christian aspect of his identity during the authoritarian regime and underscore the Taiwanese aspect in the democratic period, although the two aspects of his public identity existed concurrently throughout his lifetime. This deliberate choice of highlighting different aspects of his public identity reflects his strategical political activism when he faced different political regimes and serves as a mirror to reflect the democratic transformation of Taiwan from the 1970s to the 2000s.

Responding to the call to focus on boundary crossings, the present paper aims to analyze how Chinese Christianities crossed over into the discussions of Buddhist Master Taixu, and how the topics he discussed, words he used, and persons he met can inform our understanding of contemporaneous Chinese Christianities. It introduces a novel method into the field by utilizing corpus analysis to conduct inquiries in the entirety of Taixu’s voluminous Classical Chinese language Collected Works. The research is conducted jointly with data scientist Ádám Radványi PhD, and the questions asked include the following. What were the main topics Taixu discussed concerning Christianity? What names did he use to refer to the religion? Who were his main dialogue partners from the Christian side? Did he differentiate between various branches of the religion? Answering these questions, the paper aims to uncover new aspects of Taixu’s views and trends within Chinese Christianities.

This paper presents the case study of the Bunong, an indigenous group in Cambodia, to explore how Christian conversion affects environmental conservation efforts and the interplay between secular and religious values in conservation programs. This research sheds light on the nuanced ways in which religious conversion, particularly to Christianity, impacts the Bunong community's relationship with their ancestral lands and the broader environmental conservation initiatives in the region. It raises critical questions about how conservation INGOs navigate and negotiate the boundaries of secular and religious values, highlighting the complexities at the intersection of faith, indigenous rights, and environmental sustainability.

This paper explores the escalating phenomenon of information manipulation campaigns targeting Muslim-led humanitarian relief and development aid International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) based in the United States. Against a backdrop of geopolitical instability and evolving conflicts, it investigates the perpetrators, methods, and repercussions of such attacks. Through a series of research questions, it delves into the actors behind the manipulation, their arguments, dissemination channels, and funding sources. By bridging gaps in existing literature, it aims to shed light on the tactics used to disrupt INGO operations and impede their information-sharing functions. Ultimately, this research contributes to understanding the dynamics of a particular slice of the "Islamophobia industry" and highlights the detrimental effects of information manipulation on humanitarian efforts, policymaking, and financial access for US-based Muslim-led humanitarian relief INGOs, underscoring the urgent need for countermeasures to safeguard humanitarian work.

This paper explores the potential contributions of faith communities to the post-2030 development agenda, particularly in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It examines the roles of faith-based organizations, religious leaders, and spiritual values in addressing complex challenges such as poverty, inequality, and environmental sustainability. This research underscores the unique moral authority and capacity of faith communities to mobilize for social cohesion, policy advocacy, and ethical development practices. It also highlights the importance of interfaith collaboration and dialogue in leveraging diverse perspectives, resources, and networks for inclusive and equitable development.

Paper explores the interactions between religion and development by analyzing the case of the Al-Khidmat Foundation (AKF) in Karachi, Pakistan. Studying AKF, the paper discusses how Faith-Based Organizations (FBOs) draw on religious ideas and practices to conduct social welfare and development projects. I explore the meaning, mission, and characteristics of FBOs, in terms of their religious and political affiliations in Karachi. Findings show the emerging role of faith/religion in community development, as a counterpoint to the modern notions of secularisation. It argues that AKF occupies vantage positions over ‘non-religious’ or mainstream organizations, in terms of resources, enhanced access, and religious legitimacy. However, AKF has also been criticized for its conservative, proselytizing, and political development agendas. Such characteristics contradict the mainstream and secular discourse of development and call for a strategic and nuanced engagement of local faith actors – and therefore religion, into global development.

Following the death of Mahsa Amini in custody in 2022, after her arrest for not fully complying with the Islamic Republic’s dress code, a movement known as the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement emerged that is mainly characterized by its resistance to state control through various means, including unveiling and promoting a discourse of disobedience and self-government. While this discourse marks a radical departure from 1979 regarding Islamic governmentality, echoes of Foucault’s arguments in “Is it Useless to Revolt” are evident. In this paper, I examine the 2022 movement in tandem with this article and through the lens of Foucault’s key notion of revolt against subjugation [assujettissement]. I argue that Foucault’s concept of (political) spirituality is so broad that it encompasses both these divergent political movements, framing them primarily as revolts against governmentality that entail transformative practices of self-government.

This paper explores the way Foucault’s thinking is entangled with efforts to think, to defend, and to critique the secular. On the one hand, Foucauldian genealogy and discourse analysis are at the heart Talal Asad’s critique of secularism. On the other hand, some of the most vocal critics of Asad and his followers are acolytes of the late Edward Said and adherents to his notion of “secular criticism.” This paper attempts to gather these two conflictual streams of Foucault reception and read them back into Foucault’s text. It then asks: what secular tropes are at work in the organization of Foucault’s thinking? Does some notion of the secular inform the way Foucault writes history, thinks between epistemes, and conceives his periodizations? Might there be a political theology at work in his ethics? The paper works up and works through this problem space.

Islam has been a key feature in the history of Malaysia, and Muslims have been considered a majority community. The spread of Islam in transforming the population has been narrated as a process of Islamisation. Since the 1970s to recent times, this Islamisation narrative has gained further dominance in influencing the youths and civil society movements, educational institutions, government policies, and also legal and political decisions in the country. However, critics have perceived the Islamisation narrative as to be over-simplifying the complex inter-relations between Islam and the Malay-Muslims population. Thus, this paper aims for a critical examination, by using the Episteme as a key concept. This paper shall demonstrate how Islam is related to three different epistemic phases; under the Malay Sultanates, British Colonial rule, and the nation-state in the history of Malaysia, and its relation to knowledge and power in shaping the Muslim population in Malaysia.

Apocalyptic resistance, a term that this paper uses to refer to the resistance presented in and by the apocalypse, is inseparable from the notions of knowledge and power. However, the conception of knowledge and power and their interrelation in apocalyptic resistance deserve more examination that goes beyond the simple moral representation of (revealed) knowledge as good and pure or the common reading of a unilateral causation – knowledge giving rise to the power to resist. This essay will conduct this examination by critically engaging with Michel Foucault’s analysis of power-knowledge and showing how it problematizes the general apocalyptic understanding of revealed knowledge as merely a reception occurring in an external process outside the spatial and temporal dimensions of the world, unrelated to its existing power relations. This essay argues for a wholistic understanding of revelation, with which the power-knowledge complex that exists in apocalyptic resistance can be better identified and examined.