Ian Harris will be the TLKY Distinguished Visiting Professor in Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, in 2011-12. He will teach undergraduate courses at UTSC, lead an undergraduate/graduate workshop at UTSG, give two public talks and organize a conference during his stay in Toronto. Professor Harris lives in a rural area near the border between England and Scotland. He is a keen gardener and hill walker. Initially a student of Buddhist philosophy, his current academic interests focus on the modern and contemporary history of Cambodia, Buddhism and politics in Southeast Asia, Buddhist environmentalism, and landscape aesthetics. His most recent books are Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice (2005), Buddhism Under Pol Pot (2007), and an edited volume entitled Buddhism, Power and Politics in Southeast Asia (2007). A new work, Buddhism in a Dark Age: Cambodian Monks under the Khmer Rouge, will appear in early 2012. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Cumbria and has held previous visiting positions at the University of Oxford, the University of British Columbia, the National University of Singapore, and the Documentary Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penh. He is currently engaged in research on Buddhism and political conflict in Cambodia, 1940-75.
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April’s international conference on Buddhist Nuns in India was a great success! Sponsored by the University of Toronto/McMaster University Yehan Numata Buddhist Studies Program, the weekend event examined the lives of ordained Buddhist nuns in India from the time of the Buddha until the eventual disappearance of the bhikṣuṇī saṅgha from Indian soil. Held at the University of Toronto, the conference featured 18 invited speakers coming from North America, Europe and Japan. Audience members came from as far as Alabama for the weekend. This year, my doctoral research has taken me to Xining, Qinghai Province, in Western China, where I am researching the contemporary literature and practice of Tibetan gynaecology. My study focuses on the relations between Tibetan Buddhism, gender/sex and medical science, comparing modern medical literature and clinical practice in a hospital setting. My work in the hospital transpires in the Amdo Tibetan dialect, whereas the medical texts I study are written in a quite different, literary Tibetan. For the first few months of my trip, therefore, I took Amdo dialect lessons at a University in Xining and focussed on acquiring colloquial skills. Later, I apprenticed under a well-known female gynaecologist in the Tibetan Medical Hospital and Research Institute of Qinghai Province in Xining. She and her students taught me many aspects of medical theory and practice, including efforts to “combine” Tibetan medicine with biomedicine. Although the focus of my work is on doctors and researchers, I also saw patients and learned about the contemporary treatment of gynaecological disorders using Tibetan medicines. I also studied Tibetan gynaecological texts and spoke with doctors, students and scholars about medical theory and changes brought on by the modernization projects set by the Chinese state. Having the opportunity to observe how doctors are using Tibetan medicine to treat patients while incorporating biomedical notions and techniques, has allowed me to “see” (and attempt to translate into English) brand new forms of medical theory and practice.  Students in the Buddhist Studies Research Room: Undergraduate Buddhist Studies specialist Christopher Hiebert, MA student Chipamong Chowdhury, Doctoral student Matt King, and Wendekar, a research associate visiting from Eastern Tibet. With the semester drawing to a close, news of travel plans and awards is coming in quickly. Buddhist Studies doctoral student Matt King was awarded a Canadian Society for the Study of Religion scholarship for doctoral field research in Mongolia and Tibet this summer, and he also won a Buddhist Studies grant from the Sheng-Yen Lu Foundation’s Lotus Scholarship Fund. Doctoral student Benjamin Wood was chosen to receive the BDK Canada Scholarship to be held for one year at Bukkyo University in Kyoto. Frances Garrett was awarded a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant for a three-year project entitled “Mapping an Epic: Religion and Healing in Inner Asia.” This new award will likely take Garrett back to Xining, in Western China, this summer for an initial meeting of the project’s research team. Students will also be traveling this summer: Matt King will conduct research in Mongolia, and undergraduate Buddhist Studies specialist Christopher Hiebert, pictured above at far left, will spend the summer doing research in Dharamsala, taking a break to attend the Woodenfish in China program in July, and ending his research in time to attend a Pali language course at Oxford in August. Other students have been busy publishing. Doctoral student Bryan Levman had two articles accepted for publication: “Aśokan Phonology and the Language of the Earliest Buddhist Tradition” in the Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies; and “Is Pāli closest to the Western Aśokan dialect of Girnār?” in the Sri Lankan International Journal of Buddhist Studies. MA student Chipamong Chowdhury, pictured second from the left, published a number of book reviews: on Buddhist Monasticism in East Asia: Places of Practice (Routledge 2009); on Spirit of the Place: Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture (U Hawai’i Press 2009); on Location of Buddhism: Colonialism & Modernity in Sri Lanka (U Chicago 2010); and on South Asian Buddhism: A Survey (Routledge 2009). He also published two articles, “Ethics of Non-Killing in Buddhist Thought” in Nonkilling History: Shaping Policy with Lessons from the Past (The Center for Global Non-violence 2010); and “Did the Buddha Speak Pāli: An Investigation of the Buddha-Vacana and Origins Of Pāli” in Dhaka University of Journal of Linguistics 2 (2010). Among the faculty, Frances Garrett and DAAD Visiting Professor Mona Schrempf have published a book, Health, Medicine, and Modernity in Tibetan Contexts, co-edited with Sienna Craig and Mingji Cuomo (Int’l Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies GmbH 2011).
Religion major Jasveen Puri’s work with PhD candidate Smita Kothari involves translating and transcribing interviews from the Hindi language that Smita conducted during her ethnographic study of a sect in Jainism known as the Terapantha. The study explores notions of charity and meditation practices within this sect and how they relate to social issues, such as ecology, economy and social justice. MA student Sean Hillman is working with Professor Will Tuladhar-Douglas, an anthropologist who does extensive field-work with the Newari of Kathmandu Valley. Based in Aberdeen, Dr. Tuladhar-Douglas is currently the TLKY Distinguished Visiting Professor in Buddhist Studies for 2010 at the University of Toronto. His current project looks at agricultural, landscaping and architectural practices among immigrant Buddhists in the GTA, and the research team is investigating immigrant participation in community gardens, with an emphasis on the culturally-specific herbs/foods used by mothers.
“I found the exercise very valuable and the staff was excellent: Paul Harrison and Alex von Rospatt from Berekely, Luis Gomez (now in Mexico) and Michael Hahn (Germany), Carmen Dragonetti and Fernando Tola (both in Argentina). We compared the Sanskrit with the extant Tibetan and three extant Chinese versions. There were 15 PHD students who participated from all over the world. We were divided into three groups, meeting with one of the faculty in the morning (on a rotating basis) and in the afternoon, there was a plenary session, where the results of our morning work were compared with the results of the other groups. I learned a lot about translation theory, and the practice of good translation, more about Sanskrit and much more about Tibetan and Chinese as well. It was great! They have now formed a committee to translate the entire book and publish the results, and I and about 7 others have volunteered to continue translating to completion, which is anticipated by the end of the year, with publication next year.”
Helen then traveled to Nepal for the month of June exploring religious and cultural sites and observing various spiritual practices. In Kathmandu visited the Buddhist pilgrimage site Boudha and Swayambhunath, where she witnessed a modern day Buddhist funeral and cremation ceremony. Helen also spent time traveling the Kathmandu Valley, hiking to the newly refurbished world’s tallest Shiva Statue and also spending time visiting smaller Buddhist stupas scattered across the valley. Over the month of July Helen participated in The Woodenfish Project, Buddhism in China tour for graduate students and professors. With the group she traveled to various historical and modern Buddhist cultural and religious sites over mainland China. The tour included traveling to temples and archeological sites in Jiangsu, Beijing, and Shanxi. The tour included attending a conference on Huayan Buddhism in Mount Wutai and spending time in the Datong grottos. While in China Helen accepted an offer to study at the Fo Guang University (http://www.fgu.edu.tw/) located in a small village on Lin Mei Mountain in Taiwan. So over this next year, Helen will be studying Chinese, taking courses and doing preliminary thesis research in Taiwan. Since returning from the International Summer School for Jain Studies in India, the end of which had me giving my first paper presentation ever on “Jain Voluntary Death as a Model for Secular End-of-life Care” in New Delhi, several opportunities to present on the topic have come. The novel practice of Jain voluntary death was [...] [...] Buddhist Studies MA student Sean Hillman, whose research focuses on Buddhist health-care ethics, was featured in the Hindustan Times (Lucknow Edition), together with other students participating in the International Summer School for Jain Studies academic visit to Varanasi, India. Buddhist Studies doctoral student Matt King’s story about the earthquake in Tibet was featured in the [...] [...] The Asia-Pacific Reader is a University of Toronto, Asian Institute graduate student publication and online resource that fosters interdisciplinary academic exploration of contemporary Asia. Although it sprang originally from the MAPS (Master of Arts in Asia-Pacific Studies) program, it is meant to serve as a resource for the entire Asian studies community at the University. [...] A partnership between University of Toronto faculty and students, Eastern Tibetan photographers, writers, musicians and ethnographers, and independent scholars living in Qinghai Province has resulted in the creation of a new online resource, PlateauCulture.org. A platform for sharing digital resources about the Tibetan plateau, the site maps geocoded images, articles, place summaries and bibliographic sources to illustrate culture, life and history of the area. [...] Professor Juhn Ahn has been awarded a prestigious year-long (2010-11) Mellon Fellowship for research at the Institute for Advanced Studies in New Jersey, where he will begin a new project on Korean Buddhism. He plans to develop a picture of how changing habits of reading and disciplining the body are related to broader historical changes, such as the rise of new social groups and concomitant crises among more traditional elements of political power. [...] The Government of Canada has granted $25 million to create the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies at the newly established Munk School of Global Affairs. The Munk School of Global Affairs was the recipient earlier this month of a $35-million gift from Peter and Melanie Munk that will be used to dramatically expand UofT’s research capacity, hire new faculty and expand facilities. [...] For two months I had been exploring Tibetan cultural areas in Qinghai province, as part of my doctoral research on Tibetan and Mongolian religious history. My trip was funded by a grant from the Canadian government won by my professor, who is in Qinghai this entire year doing research and setting up cultural preservation projects with local Tibetan academics, cultural figures and university students. For the last week of my trip, I had hoped to travel south-west from Xining out of the Tibetan cultural region known as Amdo, down to Yushu County and the small village of Zadoi in an area that is known to Tibetans as Kham. [...] Yushu, the site of a devastating earthquake on April 14, is part of the Eastern Tibetan region of Kham. Today it is administered as a “Tibetan autonomous prefecture” in Western China’s Qinghai province, with a population that is 97% Tibetan. The county seat of Jyekundo was nearly demolished by the quake. [...] |
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