Author: surabhi

Lecture List Hillary Term 2024

Lecture List Hillary Term 2024

Posted on by surabhi

Lecture List
Hilary Term 2024

Sunday 14th January – Saturday 9th March

Library opening hours are Monday to Friday, 9.30-4.30.

Calender view

Hinduism 2: Traditions and Theologies

Week 1-8, Friday 4.00-5.00
Faculty of Theology & Religion
Dr Rembert Lutjeharms

This paper traces the development of Hinduism from the medieval period through to modernity. The course will examine Hindu scholasticism, devotional and tantric traditions, and modern Hindu thought. The lectures will explore themes of liberation, the soul and the divine, Tantra and meditation, devotional literature and the formation of modern Hindu identity.

Sanskrit and Pali Prelims 2

Sanskrit and Pali, Week 1-4, Wednesdays 4.30-5.30, Fridays 10.00-12.00
Sanskrit, Week 5-8, Wednesdays 4.30-6.00, Fridays 10.30-12.00
Pali, Week 5-8, Tuesdays 4.00-5.30, Thursdays 4.00-5.30
OCHS Library
Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen

The course provides an introduction to Sanskrit for the preliminary paper of the Theology and Religion Faculty in Elementary Sanskrit. Students of Pali will join the Sanskrit course in Michaelmas Term and for the first four weeks of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term, Sanskrit and Pali will be taught as two separate courses, i.e. Sanskrit Prelims and Pali for Sanskritists.  

Sanskrit Prelims: A range of relevant Hindu and Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment in the Sanskrit course. The class is designed to introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Sanskrit grammar, syntax, and vocabulary and its importance for the exegesis of Sanskrit texts. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. By the end of the course students will have gained a basic competency in translating classical Sanskrit and reading relevant passages from texts such as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, the Bhagavadgītā, the Haṭhayogapradīpikā and the Buddhist Heart Sūtra. The course book will be Walter Maurer’s The Sanskrit Language. Sanskrit Prelims continues throughout Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and for the first four weeks of Trinity. 

Pali Prelims: The Pali course is designed to provide an easy philological introduction to Pali Buddhist texts via Sanskrit and introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials ofPali grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. A range of relevant Pali Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment. We will read classical Theravāda Buddhist discourses from the Pāli Canon such as the Fire Sermon (Ādittapariyāya-sutta) and Dependent Origination (Paṭiccasamuppāda) as well as passages from the Dhammapadaand the Jātaka tales. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. The course book will be Dines Andersen, A Pāli Reader and Pali Glossary, 2 vols. (1901) supplemented by Rune E. A. Johansson, Pali Buddhist Texts: An Introductory Reader and Grammar (1981).  

Pali students will attend the same ‘Sanskrit and Pali’ classes as Sanskrit students in Michaelmas Term and weeks 1-4 of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term, Pali and Sanskrit students will study in separate classes. 

Readings in Phenomenology

Weeks 1-8, Monday 12.00-1.00
OCHS Library
Prof. Gavin Flood

Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century, and it has also had a deep impact on other theoretical fields more widely conceived. This term we will continue reading Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences.

Readings in Vedānta

Week 1-8, Thursday 12.00-1.00
OCHS Library
Dr Rembert Lutjeharms

Vedānta—theology grounded in the systematic exegesis of the Upa­ni­ṣ­ads—has for centuries been the primary discourse for Hindu thought. These reading sessions are intended for students who have at least an introductory knowledge of Sanskrit and are interested in Vedānta texts.

Senior Seminar in Indian Religions

Weeks 4 (Thursday 8 February) and week 7 (Wednesday 28 February), 4.30-6.00
OCHS Library
Dr Jessica Frazier

This series of regular seminars brings together scholars and students working on Indic philosophies and religions. It focuses on topics of current research: in each session, two people will present a context they are investigating for 20min, and then open it for discussion on key questions. All researchers, graduates and finalists in all areas are welcome to join.

Indian Philosophy Lectures

Week 1-4, Thursdays 2.00-3.00
Colin Matthews Room, Faculty of Philosophy, Radcliffe Humanities
Dr Jessica Frazier

These lectures explore philosophical debates and theories in Indian Philosophical traditions. In Hilary we will discuss Buddhist philosophies of no-self, idealism, metaphysical nihilism, and the possibility of ethics without selves. All are welcome.

Comparative Religion Seminar

Weeks 2, 4, 6, 8, Thursdays 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Prof. Gavin Flood and Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen

These four seminars will focus on the project of comparison as integral to the study of religions. We will seek to clarify the project of comparison in relation to contemporary concerns in the study of religions and through focusing on a specific text. The seminar will be based on weekly readings, somewhat akin to Readings in Phenomenology. This will take up again the seminar series began some years ago. The book that we will begin with is Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Palaeolithic to the Axial Age (Belknap Press, 2011).

Week 2, 25 January – chapter 1 ‘Religion and Reality’
Week 4, 8 February – chapter 2 ‘Religion and Evolution’
Week 6, 22 February – chapter 3 ‘Tribal Religion’
Week 8, 7 March – chapter 9 ‘The Axial Age IV: Ancient India’

Lectures of the Shivdasani Visiting Fellow

Shyamu Baba’s Worry

Week 5, Thursday 15 February, 2.00-3.00?
OCHS Library
Prof. David L. Haberman

During my stay at OCHS I will be translating and augmenting a lengthy 1984 Hindi commentary by the renowned Pushti Margiya scholar Shyam Manohar Goswami on the Chatuh-shloki, a short Sanskrit text written by Vallabhacharya in the sixteenth century.  I was primarily drawn to this text because it outlines the foundational thought and practice of the Pushti Marg, the Path of Grace, in a way that identifies its unique features.  As such, I believe that a presentation of this work for a wider audience will serve as a productive introduction to the Pushti Marg, a sampradaya of Braj Krishna bhakti still relatively misunderstood and unknown in the Western academy.  Shyam Manohar Goswami’s commentary also gives voice to one of his major worries: that recent developments in the Pushti Marg under certain leadership threaten to destroy the distinctive characteristic of the sampradaya.  Accordingly, in this talk I will examine the interpretive structure of the Chatuh-shloki, delineate some of the main distinguishing features of Pushti Margiya thought and practice, and explore why Shyam Manohar Goswami is so worried about how these features are today becoming diminished, or even disappearing.

Prof. David L. Haberman is Professor in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Indiana in the USA. He has research interests in medieval and modern movements of northern India. Much of his work has focused on the culture of Braj, an active Krishna pilgrimage site known for its lively temple festivals, performative traditions, and literary creations. Among his many books are ‘Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds’ (Indiana University Press, 2021), ‘ Loving Stones: Worship of Mount Govardhan: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan’ (OUP 2020), and ‘People Trees, the worship of trees in Northern India’ (OUP, 2013).

Lectures of the J.P. And Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow

The Meaning of Grammatical Gender in Sanskrit

Week 7, Thursday 29 February, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Sibylle Koch

A short description of the three natural genders forms the starting point for the discussion of grammatical gender within the Sanskrit grammatical tradition as it is represented in the Mahābhāṣya (composed circa 150 BCE). Considering this description, the grammarians explore whether it is valid in the grammatical context. In other words, they examine whether speakers add suffixes such as the feminine suffixes to words when seeing that the referent has certain specific natural gender signs. After a humorous discussion, they conclude that the description of the three natural genders cannot be transposed into the grammatical context. The grammarians therefore formulate their ‘own theory’ of gender. This theory would seem to implicate the three grammatical genders in a broader theory regarding the transformation of matter. It is therefore readily applicable to all words referring to concrete objects, be they animate or inanimate. Centuries later, Bhartṛhari (fl. circa 5th century CE) presents and further develops this theory in the gender chapter of the Vākyapadīya. Furthermore, he makes it acceptable not only to the tenants of the Sāṃkhya–Yoga schools of thought, but also to the Vaiśeṣikas and the Jains. I start by outlining the grammarians’ ‘own theory’ of grammatical gender and then go on to show Bhartṛhari’s presentation of it. Finally, I consider how Bhartṛhari attempts to make the early gender theory acceptable to other systems of thought.

Sibylle Koch is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Diwakar Acharya. She works on the Liṅgasamuddeśa in Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya.

Other Lectures and Seminars

Purāṇas in vedāntic exegesis in the second millennium

Week 3, Thursday 1 Feburary, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Dr Jonathan Duquette

The Purāṇas form a rich body of brahmanical literature dealing with topics as varied as mythology, cosmology, ritual, pilgrimage, and temple architecture. At the beginning of the second millennium, theologians of Vedānta began to use this textual corpus to lend authority to their teachings. Key to their exegesis was the postulate that Purāṇas possess epistemic authority (prāmāṇya), and thereby the capacity to function as ‘corroborating’ texts (upabṛṃhaṇa) to the Vedas. The question as to which Purāṇas have this capacity, and why, became a topic of debate in the early modern period, when exegetes of Vedānta begin to adopt radically different stances on vedāntic materials in light of their religious affiliations. The debate around the authority of Purāṇas eventually led to the radical claim, taken by the iconoclast 19th-century advaitin Rāmasubba Śāstrī, that the Purāṇas have no validity whatsoever.

Dr Jonathan Duquette is a scholar of South Asian religions whose work concentrates primarily on the history of late medieval and early modern Sanskrit intellectual traditions in India. He is Affiliated Lecturer in Sanskrit, Faculty of Divinity, and leader of the Late Vedānta Project in Cambridge. After completing his Ph.D. in religious studies at the University of Montreal (2011), Dr Duquette was a postdoctoral researcher in Hamburg (2012-13), Leiden (2013-14), Kyoto (2014-15) and Oxford (2015-2019, as a Newton International Fellow and then Marie-Curie Fellow). He was also twice a visiting 5 researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. He has published a monograph (Oxford University Press, 2021) on the rise of Śivādvaita Vedānta, a poorly understood tradition of philosophical theology that rose to prominence in early modern South India. Trained initially as a physicist, Dr Duquette also nourishes an interest for the dialogue between natural sciences and religions as well as for recent developments in philosophy of science and comparative philosophy. He has published articles in Religions of South Asia, Journal of Indological Studies, Numen, Philosophy East and West and the Journal of Indian Philosophy, and also contributed to the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopaedia for Philosophy of Religion.

Lecture List Michaelmas Term 2023

Lecture List Michaelmas Term 2023

Posted on by surabhi

Lecture List
Michaelmas Term 2023

Sunday 8th October – Saturday 2nd December

Library opening hours are Monday to Friday, 9.30-4.30.

Hinduism 1: Sources and Formations

Weeks 1-8, Friday 4.00-5.00
Faculty of Theology and Religion, Gibson Building
Dr Rembert Lutjeharms

These lectures offer a thematic and historical introduction to the sources and development of Hindu traditions from their early formation to the medieval period. We will explore the formation of Hindu traditions through textual sources, such as the Vedas, Upaniṣads and Bhagavad Gītā, along with the practices and social institutions that formed classical Hindu traditions. The lectures will include an introduction to Hindu philosophy.

Sanskrit

Week 1-8, Wednesday 4.30-5.30, Friday 10.00-12.00 
OCHS Library 
Prof. Gavin Flood

The course provides an introduction to Sanskrit for the preliminary paper of the Theology and Religion Faculty in Elementary Sanskrit. Students of Pali will join the Sanskrit course in Michaelmas Term and for the first four weeks of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term, Sanskrit and Pali will be taught as two separate courses, i.e. Sanskrit Prelims and Pali for Sanskritists. 

Sanskrit Prelims: A range of relevant Hindu and Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment in the Sanskrit course. The class is designed to introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Sanskrit grammar, syntax, and vocabulary and its importance for the exegesis of Sanskrit texts. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. By the end of the course students will have gained a basic competency in translating classical Sanskrit and reading relevant passages from texts such as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, the Bhagavadgītā, the Haṭhayogapradīpikā and the Buddhist Heart Sūtra. The course book will be Walter Maurer’s The Sanskrit Language. Sanskrit Prelims continues throughout Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and for the first four weeks of Trinity. 

Pali Prelims: The Pali course is designed to provide an easy philological introduction to Pali Buddhist texts via Sanskrit and introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials ofPali grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. A range of relevant Pali Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment. We will read classical Theravāda Buddhist discourses from the Pāli Canon such as the Fire Sermon (Ādittapariyāya-sutta) and Dependent Origination (Paṭiccasamuppāda) as well as passages from the Dhammapadaand the Jātaka tales. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. The course book will be Dines Andersen, A Pāli Reader and Pali Glossary, 2 vols. (1901) supplemented by Rune E. A. Johansson, Pali Buddhist Texts: An Introductory Reader and Grammar (1981).  

Pali students will attend the same ‘Sanskrit and Pali’ classes as Sanskrit students in Michaelmas Term and weeks 1-4 of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term, Pali and Sanskrit students will study in separate classes.

Lectures of the J.P. And Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow

Sleep, Perception, and Other Problems: Somānanda's Arguments Against the Dualist Naiyāyikas

Week 3, Wednesday, 25th October 3.00-4.00
OCHS Library
Prof. John Nemec

It has been known for some time that the non-dual Śaiva philosopher Utpaladeva (fl. c. 925-975 C.E.) turned away from arguing with Naiyāyikas and Vaiśeṣikas in his Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikās, even while his teacher Somānanda  (fl. c. 900-950 C.E.) engaged those schools extensively.  The arguments the latter offered to oppose the views of these dualist “Hindu” interlocutors, however, have to date hardly been explored.  In this talk, I will outline two major lines of argumentation offered against these competing schools of thought.  One involves the nature of sleep, and the nature of the perceptual process by which awakening from sleep might be explained.  Somānanda argues that the dualists’ model simply cannot account for such a mundane phenomenon, because the knower, the self or ātman, cannot play any decisive role in the same.  The second argument involves a comprehensive critique of the two-step perceptual process by which sense-organs convey knowledge to the ātmanvia the “mind” or manas.  Here, the dualism of the system in question, which suggests that the sense-organs and the manas have form or are mūrta, could in no way logically be linked to the ātman, which is said to be amūrtaor to have no form—unless, that is, Somānanda’s Śaiva non-dualism of all-as-the-consciousness-of-Śiva were to be implicitly adopted.

Prof. John Nemec is Professor of Indian Religions and South Asian Studies in the Department of Religious Studies of the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Ubiquitous Śiva: Somānanda’s Śivadṛṣṭi and His Tantric Interlocutors (Oxford University Press, 2011), which includes a critical edition, annotated translation, and extended study of the founding work of the famed Śaiva tantric philosophical school known as the Pratyabhijñā, as well as a sequel volume, The Ubiquitous Śiva: Somānanda’s Śivadṛṣṭi and His Philosophical Interlocutors (Oxford University Press, 2021), which also edits and translates a portion of the same text and deals with the same author’s arguments against Buddhist philosophical opponents and competing Hindu philosophical schools. A third book, entitled Brahmins and Kings, examines the intersection of religious authority and temporal power in the Sanskrit narrative literatures and is currently under peer review. Nemec serves as Editor of the Religion in Translation Series of the American Academy of Religion, and he is a Trustee of the American Institute of Indian Studies (2020-2023). He holds a Ph.D. degree in South Asia Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (2005), an M.Phil. in Classical Indian Religions from the University of Oxford (2000), an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara (1997), and a B.A. in Religion from the University of Rochester (1994). He was a Fulbright Scholar in India in the 2002-2003 academic year and Directeur d’études invité (DEI) at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris) in the spring of 2016. His current research examines not only tantric philosophical works but also the larger intellectual and cultural context of the Valley of Kashmir of the ninth to twelfth centuries, and currently he is beginning a book on the study of religion and the place of historical and textual studies in the same.

Lectures of the Shivdasani Visiting Fellow

The Self / No-Self Debate in Classical Indian Philosophy: Difficulties for the Buddhist

Week 1, Thursday 12th October 11.00-12.00
OCHS Library
Prof. Alex Watson

In the first part of the talk we will identify what was at stake in the Indian ātman debate between Nyāya and Buddhism.  Next, we will examine a Nyāya argument against Buddh­ism.  Finally, we will look at three new arguments from Rāmakaṇṭha, a Kashmir–ian author from the 10th century, belonging to the tradition of Śaiva Sid­dhānta.  They are ‘new’ both in the sense that no one had advanced them prior to Rāmakaṇṭha, and in the sense that they had not been mentioned in contemporary secondary literature prior to my work on this author.

Indian Logic and the Existence of God 1: The Atheist's Arguments

Week 3, Thursday 26th October, 11.00-12.00
OCHS Library
Prof. Alex Watson

This is the first of two lectures on Jayanta’s treatment of the question of God’s existence in his magnum opus ‘Blossoms of Reasoning‘ (Nyāyamañjarī), written in Kashmir at the end of the 9th century.  Here we will see how Jayanta articulates the case against theism, drawing on primarily Mīmāṃsā, but also Buddhist and Cārvāka, argu­ments.  The arguments will be viewed through the lens of Indian logic.  They amount to claiming that the standard inference of God’s existence is ‘unestablished’ (asiddha), ‘in­con­clusive’ (anaikāntika) and ‘contradictory’ (viruddha).

Indian Logic and the Existence of God 2: The Theist's Response to the Atheist's Arguments

Week 5, Thursday 9th November, 11.00-12.00
OCHS Library
Prof. Alex Watson 

In the previous lecture we saw how Jayanta, writing in the voice of the atheist opponent (pūrvapakṣin), argued against the existence of God.  In this lecture we see how Jayanta switches to writing in his own voice and presents his actual view (siddhānta).  He argues that if the atheist’s rejection of the God-inference were accepted, then we would have to reject the validity of all inference, including the paradigmatic inference of fire from smoke.

Prof. Alex Watson is Professor of Indian Philosophy at Ashoka University, prior to which he was Preceptor in Sanskrit at Harvard.  His DPhil was from the University of Oxford.  He is author of The Self’s Awareness of Itself (2006) and, with Dominic Goodall and Anjaneya Sarma, An Enquiry into the Nature of Liberation (mokṣa) (2013), as well as numerous articles on the History of Indian Philosophy.  He works on debates between Śaivism, Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā and Buddhism.

Other Lectures and Seminars

Readings in Vedānta

Week 1-8, Thursday 11.00-12.00
OCHS Library
Dr Rembert Lutjeharms

Vedānta—theology grounded in the systematic exegesis of the Upaniṣads—has for centuries been the primary discourse for Vaiṣṇava thought. These reading sessions are intended for students who have at least an introductory knowledge of Sanskrit and are interested in Vedānta texts.

Seminar on Indian Philosophy

Week 2 (18th October) and Week 8 (29th November), Wednesday 4.30-6.00
OCHS Library
Convened by Dr Jessica Frazier

This series of regular seminars brings together scholars and students working on Indic philosophies and religions. It focuses on topics of current research: in each session, two people will present a context they are investigating for 20min, and then open it for discussion on key questions. All researchers, graduates and finalists in all areas are welcome to join.

 
Week 2, Wednesday, 18th October, 4.30-6.00

Prof. Alex Watson: Dharmakīrti, Rāmakaṇṭha and Galen Strawson on the existence of selves

My OCHS lecture on Wednesday of Week 1 looked at how the Buddhist can easily respond to the Naiyāyika argument for a self, but faces a more difficult challenge from Rāmakaṇṭha’s arguments. Today I introduce Galen Strawson’s Buddhistic position and consider which of Rāmakaṇṭha’s arguments present a difficulty for it.

Brett Parris: The metaethics of Patañjali’s yoga

Metaethics may be characterised as the philosophical framework in which a tradition’s implicit normative ethical theory and its practical ethical precepts are embedded. Patañjali’s Yogasūtra is grounded in the dualist Sāṃkhya system and was influenced by early Buddhism. The Yogasūtra’s ethical precepts, as well as ‘the Lord’, Īśvara, play important roles for Patañjali. I argue that Patañjali’s Yoga emerged from early theistic Sāṃkhya, resisted Buddhist idealism, and yields a moral realist metaethics which may be understood as a form of natural law theory, but one quite unlike anything found in the Western traditions.

Week 8, Wednesday, 29th November, 4.30-6.00

Prof. John Nemec: On the effects of causes and causes that could have an effect: The Śaiva theory of the eternality of what is produced

This presentation explores the manner of manifestation and non-manifestation of objects of cognition in a Śaiva satkāryavāda explanation. The problem is that if the effect preexists its manifestation in the form of its identity with its cause, then it should be perceptible even before it is manifested.  In an argument against the Sāṅkhya, Somānada offers the “sadāsatkāryavāda” or doctrine of the perpetual real existence of the effect.  In looking at the text, we will find that it has a nice conceptual twist and turn to it.

Jacob Mortimer: The canonical roots of Buddhist phenomenalism

This presentation argues that there is a substantial overlap between the Yogācāra doctrine of vijñaptimātra (‘mere representation’) and expressions of phenomenalism found in early Buddhist texts such as the Sabba Sutta. I argue that the phenomenalism of early Buddhism offers a justification of key doctrines such as no-self and the denial of a creator god, and that it might furthermore be an implicit assumption of later schools of Buddhist philosophy including Abhidharma and Madhyamaka. This theory suggests that the innovations of Yogācāra are more subtle than previously thought; it also suggests that philosophical challenges that have until now been considered unique to Yogācāra (particularly the threat of solipsism) might be faced by other Buddhist schools. 

Readings in Phenomenology

Weeks 1-8, Mondays 12.00-1.00
OCHS Library
Prof. Gavin Flood

Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century, and it has also had a deep impact on other theoretical fields more widely conceived. This term we read Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology trans David Carr (Evanson: Northwestern UP, 1970).

Concepts of Self in the History of Hinduism

Weeks 3 and 8, Thursday, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Prof. Gavin Flood 

There is a history to ideas about the self. These two lectures will sketch some shifts in the ways the self has been conceptualised in that history and will in particular pay attention to tensions in Brahmanical thinking between different metaphysics of the self and social, transaction reality of persons as social actors.

Lecture 1: The sacrificial and transcendent self

Week 3, Thursday 26th October, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Prof. Gavin Flood 

In this opening lecture we will examine a first tension between the Vedic notion of sacrifice on the one hand and Upanishadic view of the self as transcendent, on the other. This also entails different concepts of redemption and differing understandings of the purpose of human life. We might offer a hypothesis that they both, in a sense, are the inverse of the other. We will focus on Mīmāṃsaka, Vedāntic and even Buddhist sources in our exploration and raise the question of how metaphysical conceptualisations relate to historical, social reality, gender roles, and notions of the common good, if at all.

Lecture 2: The possessed self, the personal self, transcendence, and its collapse

Week 8, Thursday 30th November, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Prof. Gavin Flood

Moving forward in time to the eve of modernity, we will contrast an older view of self as being able to be possessed by supernatural powers in the Śākta tradition (that God­frey Lienhardt called the ‘passiones’ model of the self), with a view of the self that emerged in the sixteenth century with Caitanya (1486-1533) and the emergent devo­tional tradition, contrasting this with the collapse of transcendence to immanence with Raghunātha Śiromaṇi (c. 1460-1540) of the Navya Nyāya, once the tantric kingdoms (apart from Nepal) were gone. We will offer a hypothesis that these conceptions of self present a new vision by re-tooling older ideas of both possession and transcendence. We will raise questions about whether such new conception has potential for social critique and how these new ideas affected modern concepts of self and society in India.

Forgotten Irish Figures in Indian Religions

Week 2, Thursday 19th October, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Prof. Brian Bocking

This lecture will be about ‘forgotten’ or at least neglected Irish figures influential within Asian religions from the decades around 1900. This will include, as well as Buddhists like U Dhammaloka and Charles Pfoundes, Hindu, Sikh and other Irish figures including Annie Besant, Sister Nivedita (Margaret Noble), and Max Arthur Macauliffe.

Prof. Brian Bocking has had a long career in Religious Studies, publishing in a number of areas. He is Professor emeritus of University College Cork where he established Ireland’s first Study of Religions Department, serving previously as Professor of the Study of Religions at SOAS. In recent years his research has turned to neglected figures in the study of religions, especially Irish men and women involved in Asian religions in the period around 1900.

Artist in Residence Talk: Art, Non-dualism, and the Divine

Week 6, Thursday 16th November, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Rosanna Dean

Rosanna will discuss how her art practice is led by her study of yoga, philosophy & Sanskrit alongside a broader focus on the importance of female authorship of cultural foundational stories. Her work brings together divergent ways in which the divine is represented from East to West and are meditations on non-dualism and how the stories we are told shape our future. She is currently using painting, meditation, physical yoga & sound to explore concepts such as Para, the point at which form again touches formlessness and the Sadhana’s psychosomatic efforts to assimilate one’s body to higher and higher levels of cosmic body pattern. She will pose questions about where this work can be positioned, authorship and the importance of listening.

Rosanna Dean is a multi-disciplinary artist living in London. She received her MA from the Royal College of Art (2019), studied old master painting in Florence at the Angel Academy (2014). She has spoken on spiritual practice in contemporary art at the Courtauld Institute of Art and following a year residency at the Florence Trust received EU funding to develop her work exploring and converging different ways of representing the divine. Her journey with yoga began 12 years ago discovering ashtanga following a sudden and traumatic experience with death. In 2020 she went to India to deepen her yoga practice, qualifying as an Ashtanga yoga teacher in Mysore and researching ritual practices including Tantra and Theyyam in Karnataka.

Connecting the Epistemology of Nyaya to 20th Century Analytic Epistemology

Week 6, Friday 17th November, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library / Zoom
Prof. Anand Jayprakash Vaidya

This lecture will present how and why it is important to study cross-cultural epistemology. I will focus on Nyaya and Analytic epistemology, especially Gangesha, the Oxford Realists, such as H.A. Pritchard and T. Williamson, the Los Angeles Externalist, T. Burge, and the Pittsburgh Disjunctvist, J. McDowell. I will discuss three topics. First, the analysis of knowledge and justification. Second, the philosophy of perception. Third, the relevance of the theory of certification in Nyaya as an intervention into Analytic epistemology. Along the way I will suggest some revisions to Gangesha so as to update how his theory can engage contemporary epistemology.

Prof. Anand Jayprakash Vaidya is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, San Jose State University. Among his research interests is the epistemology of modality or how we come to know what is possible and necessary for the variety of kinds of particulars that there are. He defends an epistemological approach to show how we can know what is metaphysically possible and necessary.

Lecture List Trinity Term 2023

Lecture List Trinity Term 2023

Posted on by surabhi

Lecture List
Trinity Term 2023

Sunday 23rd April – Saturday 17th June 2023

OCHS lectures and seminars will be held in accordance with University policy.

Sanskrit Prelims

Week 1-4, Wednesday 4.30-6.00, Friday 2.30-4.00
OCHS Library
Professor Gavin Flood FBA

A range of relevant Hindu and Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment in the Sanskrit course. The class is designed to introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Sanskrit grammar, syntax, and vocabulary and its importance for the exegesis of Sanskrit texts. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. By the end of the course students will have gained a basic competency in translating classical Sanskrit and reading relevant passages from texts such as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, the Bhagavadgītā, the Haṭhayogapradīpikā and the Buddhist Heart Sūtra. The course book will be Walter Maurer’s The Sanskrit Language. Sanskrit Prelims continues throughout Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and for the first four weeks of Trinity.

Pali Prelims (Pali for Sanskritists)

Week 1-4, Tuesday 4.00-5.30, Thursday, 4.00-5.30
OCHS Library
Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen

Pali students will attend the same ‘Sanskrit and Pali’ classes as Sanskrit students in Michaelmas Term and weeks 1-4 of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term, Pali and Sanskrit students will study in separate classes. The Pali course is designed to providean easy philological introduction to Pali Buddhist texts via Sanskrit and introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Pali grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. A range of relevant Pali Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment. We will read classical Theravāda Buddhist discourses from the Pāli Canon such as the Fire Sermon (Ādittapariyāya- sutta) and Dependent Origination (Paṭiccasamuppāda) as well as passages from the Dhammapada and the Jātaka tales. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. The course book will be Dines Andersen, A Pāli Reader and Pali Glossary, 2 vols. (1901) supplemented by Rune E. A. Johansson, Pali Buddhist Texts: An Introductory Reader and Grammar (1981).

Readings in Vedānta

Week 1-8, Thursday 10.00-11.00
OCHS Library
Dr Rembert Lutjeharms

Vedānta—theology grounded in the systematic exegesis of the Upaniṣads—has for centuries been the primary discourse for Vaiṣṇava thought. These reading sessions are intended for students who have at least an introductory knowledge of Sanskrit and are interested in Vedānta texts. This term we are reading Vedānta Deśika’s Nyāsa- viṃśati, a short but influential treatise on surrender to God from the fourteenth century.

Readings in Middle Bengali: Vaṃśī Śikṣā

Weeks 1-4, Thursday 12.00-1.00
OCHS Library
Dr Lucian Wong

The Vaṃśī Śikṣā is a Middle Bengali Vaiṣṇava text ascribed to the early eighteenth century author Premadāsa Miśra, who is associated with the Baghnapara community of Vaiṣṇavas in the district of Bardhaman. The text principally deals with an esoteric form of practice known as rāsarājopāsana, or worship of the king of taste. The interpretation of this practice has been an issue of some contention in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava scholarship for some time. In these group reading sessions, we will read and discuss sections of the text that pertain to rasarājopāsana, attempting to decipher the nature of the practice and its possible significance in broader Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava history.

Readings in Phenomenology

Weeks 1-4, Mondays 12.00-1.00
OCHS Library
Professor Gavin Flood FBA

Our reading group will continue to get to grips with the late Heidegger and will read essays from Basic Writings, beginning with ‘On The Way to Language’.

Indian Philosophy and Religion Seminars

Week 3 and 7, Wednesday, 4.30-6.00
OCHS Library
Dr Jessica Frazier

This series of regular seminars brings together scholars and students working on Indic philosophies and religions. It focuses on topics of current research: in each session, two people will present a context they are investigating for 20min, and then open it for discussion on key questions. All researchers, graduates and finalists in all areas are welcome to join.

Week 3, Wednesday 10th May, 4.30-6.00

Dr Szilvia Szanyi: “Is shape real? A contested category of perception in Abhidharma philosophy.”

Shree Nahata: ‘Eat Curd, Not Camel! Dharmakīrti and Akalaṅka on anekāntavāda’
This presentation examines the Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti’s (c. 600-660 CE) objections to the Jaina theory of many-sidedness (anekāntavāda) and the Jaina philosopher Akalaṅka’s (c. 720-780 CE) response to these objections. Besides discussing the relevant philosophical ideas, this presentation highlights the role of misunderstanding, humour, narrative biography, and pointed moral critique in this entertaining philosophical vignette.

Week 7, Wednesday 7th June, 4.30-6.00

Prof Jan Westerhoff: The double moon (dvicandra) example, solipsism, and the private language argument.

Kassandra Dugi: ‘‘Like Grain Springing up in a Well Cleaned Field’: Self-Attachment, Meditative Absorption and Wisdom in Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra’.
In his commentary on Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, Prajñākaramati explains that ‘like grain springing up in a well cleaned field, wisdom appears in the mental continuum completely purified by mental calm.’ Taking this analogy as a starting point, this presentation will question the standard interpretation of the Bodhicaryāvatāra’s most famous passage (8.90-103) as defending a particular ethical stance on the basis ofanātmanand/or emptiness, by re-examining the relationship between self-attachment, meditative absorption and wisdom within the Bodhicaryāvatāra.

Lectures of the J.P. And Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow

Challenging Expectations: Interpreting the Bengali Satya Nārāyaṇer Puthi of Kavivallabh

Week 2, Thursday 4th May, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Professor Tony Stewart

The early modern Bengali literatures dedicated to the figure of Satya Pīr and Satya Nārāyaṇ are voluminous, second only to the vast Vaiṣṇav corpus generated by the followers of Kṛṣṇa Caitanya. But apart from editing the manuscripts and on occasion retelling his marvel-filled stories, the texts have evaded the critical eye of scholars. I invite you to join me in a collective attempt (seminar style) to interpret a text variously titled Satya Nārāyaṇer Puthi or Satya Pīrer Puthi of Kavivallabh (copies of its translation will be made available in advance*). This will be an exegetical exercise that should reveal some of the hermeneutical complexities in taking seriously the miraculous and fabulous events recorded in these religious narratives that are routinely dismissed as simplistic folk tales or fairy tales.

* My unabridged translation appears in Needle at the Bottom of the Sea: Bengali Tales from the Land of the Eighteen Tides (University of California Press, 2023), pp. 341-72.

Alternatives to the Gosvāmī Master Narrative: Vernacular Explorations in the Vaiṣṇav Imagination of the 16th-18th c.

Week 6, Thursday 1st June, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Professor Tony Stewart

The persuasive master narrative of the life of Caitanya articulated by Kṛṣṇadās Kavirāj, which was itself grounded in the weight of the Gosvāmīs’ corporate theology, eventually imposed a monologic that has effectively silenced, or at least sidelined (but did not completely eliminate) other voices. Over the last century and a half, the power of institutionalized print culture has solidified this hold. From the earliest period there were followers who celebrated the gaur nāgar bhāv,nadiyā nāgar bhāv, and sakhi bhāv, all voices that have been muffled and even on occasion attacked, while individuals who articulated sahajiyā style interpretations have been routinely marginalized. And we know, for instance, that the powerful community in Bāghnāpāḍā gave rise to a unique perspective on the life of Caitanya and his identification with Kṛṣṇa, with ritual forms appropriate to that vision. I wish to argue that the early history of the Vaiṣṇavs in Bengal is a much more vibrant exploration of intellectual and devotional possibilities than the mainstream today acknowledges. And much of the evidence can be found in the troves of unpublished Bengali manuscripts in the repositories of Bengal. I want to share a handful of examples from those unpublished works that suggest we are not done writing the early history of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇav community in Bengal.

Professor Tony K. Stewart retired from teaching in 2021 and is now the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities, Emeritus, at Vanderbilt University. Within the Hindu traditions his research has focused on the creation of the Gaudiya Vaisnava movement of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the results of which can be found in his monograph titled The Final Word: the Caitanya Caritamrta and the Grammar of Religious Tradition (Oxford 2010). This work was preceded by a translation of the  encyclopaedic Caitanya Caritamrta of Krsnadasa Kaviraja, which he produced with the late Edward C. Dimock, Jr. (Harvard Oriental Series, 1999). Followers of the Vaisnava traditions also recognize a figure named Satya Pir, which provided a segue into the Islamic, especially Sufi, literatures of the Bangla-speaking world (West Bengal and Bangladesh). Satya Pir, who is considered to be both an avatara of Krsna as well as a Sufi saint, represents a rapprochment of Muslims and Hindus in the plural Bengali society of the premodern period. In Fabulous Females and Peerless Pirs: Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal (Oxford 2004) Prof. Stewart translated eight tales out of several hundred, each focused on the ways women, aided by Satya Pir, keep the world ordered in the wake of male-generated chaos. That literature prompted him to write Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination (California, 2019), which examines the ways the Islamic imaginaire has insinuated itself seamlessly into a Bengali consciousness through fictional heroes who extend their help and protection to anyone regardless of sectarian affiliation. This work was awarded the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies in 2021.Unabridged translations of many of those tales appear in Needle at the Bottom of the Sea: Bengali Tales from the Land of the Eighteen Tides (California, 2023). His current work focuses on alternative communal narratives in the first centuries of Gaudiya Vaisnava history.

Lectures of the Shivdasani Visiting Fellow

Gendering Jajmani, Caste-ing Monastic Governmentality and Capital

Week 3, Thursday 11th May, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Professor Indrani Chatterjee

In 1855, Rashmoni, a widow of the caste of fishermen, built a large temple on the bank of the Ganges. Then she employed three very poor rural Brahmin men to serve as priests, paying each a small cash-salary, supplemented with annuals gifts of cloth, grain and fuel. Historians of medieval India have long characterized such temple- construction as royal activity, capping their status of yajamans (colloquially jajman) or patrons of ritual (yajna). By this reckoning, Rashmoni’s actions should have also qualified her as a royal yajaman. Yet neither postcolonial nor feminist historians of South Asia have written of these lower-caste widows as royal patrons. What explains their silence? This talk aims to open up the intersections of gender, governmentality and capital through the peculiar relationship identified in jajmani in the records of the first half of the nineteenth century in eastern South Asia.

Indrani Chatterjee is a Professor of History at the University of Texas, Austin. In her pioneering work over the past twenty-five years, Chatterjee has illuminated new dimensions of a variety of underexplored themes in South Asia’s past—including slavery, the household, and monasticism—and has critically reappraised gender and sexuality as frameworks in South Asian history. Her published works include: Gender, Slavery, and Law in Colonial India (OUP 1999), Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (ed. Permanent Black 2004), and Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, Memories of Northeast India (OUP 2013).

Other Talks and Seminars

Potential Avenues for Research on Tantric Forms of Vaiṣṇavism in Bengal (Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā)

Week 2, Wednesday 3rd May, 3.00-4.00
OCHS Library
Dr Robert Czyżykowski

Research on premodern Tantric groups related to the Caitanya (or Gauḍīya) Vaiṣṇava tradition of Bengal is rather rare and difficult for many reasons, such as limited data and the esoteric language of the texts. In this paper, I propose to critically look at the textual sources with occasional reference to field reports indicating potential areas for fruitful academic exploration in this domain, highlight mutual influence among various Sahajiyā works and their origins. The presentation will be based on the author’s exploration of largely unpublished Middle Bengali sources. I will focus in particular on the Niguḍārthaprakāśāvalī (‘A ray on hidden meanings’), which survives in only three manuscripts, two of which are available in public collections (Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, Kolkata, and the Sukumar Sen collection in the National Library in Kolkata). The text stands as a rare example of explicit commentarial effort in the premodern Sahajiyā corpus, one in which earlier texts are recognized as foundational for the tradition – or at least for the Sahajiyā line established by influential Sahajiyā author and guru, Mukundadeva or Mukunda Gosvami). The Niguḍārthaprakāśāvalī is also unique in offering details about the sexual rituals of the Sahajiyā tradition.

Robert Czyżykowski obtained a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Jagiellonian University (2011) and is currently an assistant professor in the Institute for the Study of Religions at Jagiellonian University, Krakow Poland. His work focusses on Hinduism, vernacular Bengali Tantric tradition, and religious experience.

Ordeals and Judicial Wagers

Week 4, Thursday 18th May, 11.00-12.00
OCHS Library
Professor Dr Harald Weise

‘This Lecture is about an Old Indian judicial institution called paṇa (“wager”). Within a court proceeding, a judicial wager is a certain sum of money that a conflicting party offers to pay if he ends up losing his case. This paper explains the rationale of judicial wagers by showing that they may signal truthfulness.’

Professor Dr Weise is an Economist and Indologist from the University of Leipzig.

Artist in Residence Talk: Art, Non-dualism, and the Divine

Week 4, Thursday 18th May, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Rosanna Dean

Rosanna will discuss how her art practice is led by her study of yoga, philosophy & Sanskrit alongside a broader focus on the importance of female authorship of cultural foundational stories. Her work brings together divergent ways in which the divine is represented from East to West and are meditations on non-dualism and how the stories we are told shape our future. She is currently using painting, meditation, physical yoga & sound to explore concepts such as Para, the point at which form again touches formlessness and the Sadhana’s psychosomatic efforts to assimilate one’s body to higher and higher levels of cosmic body pattern. She will pose questions about where this work can be positioned, authorship and the importance of listening.

Rosanna Dean is a multi-disciplinary artist living in London. She received her MA from the Royal College of Art (2019), studied old master painting in Florence at the Angel Academy (2014). She has spoken on spiritual practice in contemporary art at the Courtauld Institute of Art and following a year residency at the Florence Trust received EU funding to develop her work exploring and converging different ways of representing the divine. Her journey with yoga began 12 years ago discovering ashtanga following a sudden and traumatic experience with death. In 2020 she went to India to deepen her yoga practice, qualifying as an Ashtanga yoga teacher in Mysore and researching ritual practices including Tantra and Theyyam in Karnataka.

Sapiens and Sthitaprajna

Week 5, Thursday 25th May, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Dr Ashwini Mokashi

This lecture will present the concept of a wise person in the Stoic Seneca and in the Bhagavad-gītā. Although the Gītā and Seneca’s writings were composed at least two centuries apart, and a continent apart, they have much in common in recommending a well-lived life. This lecture will examine how a wise person in both texts is endowed with virtue and wisdom, is moral, makes right judgements, and takes responsibility for actions. A wise and virtuous person alwavs enjoys happiness, as happiness consists knowing that one has done the right thing at the right time. Both Seneca and the Gītā demand intellectual rigour and wisdom for leading a virtuous and ettective life. They provide guidelines for how to become and be wise. Both systems demand a sage to be emotionally sound and devoid of passions. This leads to mental peace and balance, and ultimatelv to tranquillitv and happiness. This lecture will explore these issues in a comparative context.

Against Infinite Nothingness: Arguments East and West for a Foundation of Reality

Week 4-6, Wednesdays, 3.00-4.00
OCHS Library
Dr Jessica Frazier

Must there be a fundamental ground of things? And if so, what would it have to be like? Or alternatively, could phenomena float free of each other, un-united and ungrounded by deeper causation or constitution? The conflict between scepticism and metaphysical thinking, between notions of nothingness and ideas of Being (or even the divine), has taken place in different traditions through history. These three seminars investigate three models of an ultimate metaphysical ground of things. Borrowing from the Vedanta tradition’s medieval arguments against Buddhism nihilism, we will discuss issues of substance, causation and modality, and see what kind of unified ultimate reality one might argue for.

Week 4: Fragments or Foundations? Universal Emptiness vs Fundamental Unity in India

Week 5: What Shapes Reality? Grounding the Modal Order of Things

Week 6: Stuff, Power or Space? Finding an ‘Ultimate’ Reality

Conference

The Sanskrit Traditions Symposium

Week 6, Friday 2nd June
Trinity College

The Sanskrit Traditions Symposium is a forum for the discussion of the Sanskrit traditions of South Asia, and the texts and cultures that have risen out of them. It brings together established and rising academics for the focused examination of research pertaining to various aspects of South Asia’s rich Sanskrit religious and intellectual culture. It thereby seeks to sustain and build upon the long history of scholarship in this important area of study.

Further details to be announced.

Lecture List Hilary Term 2023

Lecture List Hilary Term 2023

Posted on by surabhi

Lecture List
Hilary Term 2023

Sunday 15th January – Saturday 11th March

Hinduism 2: Modern Hinduism

Week 1-8, Friday 4.00-5.00
Faculty of Theology & Religion
Dr Rembert Lutjeharms

This paper traces the development of Hinduism from the medieval period through to modernity. The course will examine Hindu scholasticism, devotional and tantric traditions, and modern Hindu thought. The lectures will explore themes of liberation, the soul and the divine, Tantra and meditation, devotional literature and the formation of modern Hindu identity.

Sanskrit and Pali Prelims 2

Week 1-8, Wednesday 4.30-6.00, Friday 10.30-12.00
OCHS Library
Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen

The course provides an introduction to Sanskrit for the preliminary paper of the Theology and Religion Faculty in Elementary Sanskrit. Students of Pali will join the Sanskrit course in Michaelmas Term and for the first four weeks of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term, Sanskrit and Pali will be taught as two separate courses, i.e., Sanskrit Prelims and Pali for Sanskritists.

Sanskrit Prelims: A range of relevant Hindu and Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment in the Sanskrit course. The class is designed to introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Sanskrit grammar, syntax, and vocabulary and its importance for the exegesis of Sanskrit texts. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. By the end of the course students will have gained a basic competency in translating classical Sanskrit and reading relevant passages from texts such as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, the Bhagavadgītā, the Haṭhayogapradīpikā and the Buddhist Heart Sūtra. The course book will be Walter Maurer’s The Sanskrit Language. Sanskrit Prelims continues throughout Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and for the first four weeks of Trinity. 

Pali prelims (Pali for sanskritists)

Week 5-8, Tuesday 4.00-5.30, Thursday 4.00-5.30
OCHS Library
Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen

Pali students will attend the same ‘Sanskrit and Pali’ classes as Sanskrit students in Michaelmas Term and weeks 1-4 of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term, Pali and Sanskrit students will study in separate classes. 

The Pali course is designed to provide an easy philological introduction to Pali Buddhist texts via Sanskrit and introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Pali grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. A range of relevant Pali Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment. We will read classical Theravāda Buddhist discourses from the Pāli Canon such as the Fire Sermon (Ādittapariyāya-sutta) and Dependent Origination (Paṭiccasamuppāda) as well as passages from the Dhammapada and the Jātaka tales. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. The course book will be Dines Andersen, A Pāli Reader and Pali Glossary, 2 vols. (1901) supplemented by Rune E. A. Johansson, Pali Buddhist Texts: An Introductory Reader and Grammar (1981).  

Readings in Phenomenology

Weeks 1-8, Monday 12.00-1.00
OCHS Library
Professor Gavin Flood

Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century, and it has also had a deep impact on other theoretical fields more widely conceived. This term we will read essays from Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Off the Beaten Track), in particular ‘The Origin of the Work of Art.’ We’ve read Being and Time and then Basic Problems, this takes us into the later work of the philosopher.

Lectures of the J.P. And Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow

9 Rooms: Philip Rawson and the exhibiting of tantra

Week 5, Thursday 16th February, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Professor Chris Dorsett

 Both my lectures are about a leading British authority on Indian art, Philip Rawson (1924-1995). The title of my first lecture refers to the nine enclosed spaces in which the celebrated Tantra exhibition he curated in 1971 was laid out at London’s Hayward Gallery. The arrangement confounded an important modernist conviction that any exhibit worth seeing required a clinically minimal mode of display. The Hayward was a minimal ‘white cube’ but, paradoxically, Rawson gathered hundreds of historical Indian items within confined coloured rooms, and heightened the viewer’s sensory engagement with ambient sound and slide projections. The results were widely held to have had greater contemporary resonance than the concurrent exhibition of new Californian art on the Hayward’s upper floor.

The contradiction was not lost on me. As a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art I had gone to see what artists on the west coast of America were doing, but discovered instead, much closer to home, experimental forms of art practice being spectacularly put to work in the service of cultural material usually found in museums. Frustratingly, the Arts Council of Great Britain archive, which holds documents on the commissioning and popular reception of this exhibition, contains no installation photographs; so there is no record of what Tantra actually looked like. As a result, I will set out how the research I am undertaking at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies re-engages with the sensorily-charged enclosures that Rawson derived from the nine emotional states (rasas) described by the tantric sage Abhinavagupta. The impact of Rawson’s tantrism on the London art scene of the early 1970s will be re-appraised, but my real goal is the creation of new practice-based contexts for researching his pioneering exhibition-making. Just over 50 years after Tantra closed I would like to see the show’s curator receive more attention.

9 Bookmarks: Rawson's writing and the influence of Abhinavagupta

Week 7, Thursday 2nd March, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Professor Chris Dorsett

Lecture two is an analysis of Philip Rawson’s textual references to the aesthetic speculations of Abhinavagupta, which not only influenced the layout of the Tantra exhibition, but also provided a theoretical underpinning for the many art books Rawson wrote throughout his career. He was a very creative museum professional who also thought of himself as an art educator and, from this perspective, he saw art schools as laboratories for the advancement of sensory experience and the amplification of what we now call ‘affect’. 

In the Tantra exhibition he had (purposely, I think) addressed the experimental aspirations of Western art students, and those of us who thronged the Hayward Gallery were busy reading his latest publications. In particular, Drawing (1969) and Ceramics (1971) were landmarks in their field, and Indian aesthetics are perceptively at work in both books – both entwine passionate explorations of the ‘language’ of these art forms with the sensible, embodied, and numinous values we associate with Abhinavagupta’s philosophical reflections. Consequently, in this second lecture I discuss some of the most theoretical passages in Rawson’s writing at the time he was curating the Hayward show. 

Over the years, my own copies of Drawing and Ceramics have accumulated impromptu bookmarks made from offcuts of my drawings, and these must figure in the discussion because they are a by-product of my long rumination on Rawson’s educational thinking. A year after the Tantra exhibition closed he joined the staff at the Royal College of Art and became my teacher and mentor. Thus, my account is built upon a great deal of direct knowledge which is, on the one hand, sensitive to the educative significance Rawson attributed to aesthetic encounters, but on the other hand, inflected by an acknowledgement that his books are now placed at some distance from a world that is post-structuralist, postmodern, and postcolonial.

Professor Chris Dorsett is an artist and academic whose career has been built on curatorial partnerships with collection-holding institutions. In the UK he is best known for his pioneering exhibitions at the Pitt Rivers Museum where, having stepped back from his art school commitments in 2018, he is now an Associate Researcher. Dorsett’s many overseas projects include museum ‘interventions’ across the Nordic region and fieldwork residencies in the Amazon and at the walled village of Kat Hing Wai in the New Territories of Hong Kong. These projects were developed during university appointments at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford; Central St. Martin’s School of Art, London; Royal University Institute of Fine Art, Stockholm; Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne; and Edinburgh School of Art. He is on the editorial board of Museum Worlds and has written extensively on the interface between experimental art practices and the museum/heritage sector for publishers such as Routledge and Intellect Books. Most recently, in conjunction with the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, he has been researching the museological legacy of the historian of Indian Art, Philip Rawson.

Other Lectures

Metaphysical Thinking in India

Weeks 2, 4, 6, 8, Thursdays, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Professor Gavin Flood

These lectures will reflect on metaphysical speculation in the history of Indian religions paying particular attention to the ways in which doing, or practice, connects with thinking, or philosophy, and how metaphysical concerns address problems of the relation of self to world, the nature and meaning of sacrifice, the category of the self in relation to person and transcendence, and the nature of language. Although the chronological span of these lectures will be wide, we will nevertheless focus on the early medieval (i.e., the post-Gupta) period for by this time the different schools were established and there is a history of discourse that we can examine. The implicit thesis of the lectures is that action, and in particular ritual action, is the backbone of tradition and that philosophical reflection emerges from the nature of humans as creatures who act. We will not simply present and assess arguments, but rather try to open out or enter into the world in which metaphysical thinking occurs through examining ritual and meditative literature as well as philosophical commentaries and independent works. Examples chosen will mostly be from the religions of Śiva and the Goddess but not exclusively so.

Lecture 1: The Metaphysics of the Act

Week 2, 26th January, 2.00-3.00

Sacrifice is at the foundation of the history of Indian thinking about the nature of the world, God, and human beings. There is a large literature that focusses on ritual action from early Vedic texts to ritual manuals (paddhatis) in the medieval period. This emphasis on action in the Brahmanical imagination led to the development of the school of Vedic exegesis, the Mīmāṃsā, which presents a philosophy of action that the lecture will explore. For the Mīmāṃsā, the most significant feature of human reality is that we act: action is the most distinctive human feature, more important than cognition, because action has consequences in the world. Above all, as human beings we need to be concerned with action as enjoined by scriptural revelation, thus ritual action. The ritual act for the Mīmāṃsā, namely the sacrifice, is performed not to achieve a specific purpose, such as going to heaven at death, but because it is enjoined by scripture. The Mīmāṃsā is thus reflection not so much on ritual per se but on the nature of Vedic anguagee. We should act in conformity to dharma, truth or duty, and the founding text of the philosophical school, Jaimini’s Mīmāṃsā Sūtra, opens with the statement: ‘Now the inquiry into Dharma’.

Lecture 2: The Existence of God

Week 4, 9th February, 2.00-3.00

Although the Mīmāṃsā reflected on action and language as the essential components of any account of what it is to be human, there were also systems that presented more abstract arguments for the existence of a putative theistic reality, particularly the Nyāya or Logical School and the Śaiva schools. We will describe these arguments and place them in relation to wider cultural concerns about the act and raise the question as to what these arguments sought to achieve and for whom they were written.

Lecture 3: Implicit metaphysics in the Netra-tantra

Week 6, 23rd February, 2.00-3.00

A focus on action and drawing from it a metaphysics or proto-philosophy, is found in the Netra-tantra, originally composed in the seventh or eighth centuries. This text is replete with suggestions for performance in different deity systems, yet retains a conceptual and textual coherence. We will examine the idea of a trans-cosmic reality in the text, how this manifests in and as world, and how different systems of action (ritual and meditation) lead to that reality.

Lecture 4: Explicit metaphysics of Non-Dual Śaivism

Week 8, 9th March, 2.00-3.00

The dualist school of the religion Śiva, the Śaiva Siddhānta, is rooted in ritual action which it regards as salvific. Through certain acts following initiation by the master who embodies Śiva for the duration of the rite, the practitioner can be saved from suffering in the cycle of action. Metaphysics here is on the leash of the ritual act. By contrast the non-dual Śaivas regarded the distinctions of human reality to be based on a misguided cognition that needs to be replaced by the recognition (prayabhijñā) that cognition or gnosis (jñāna) not action, is salvific. This philosophy is supported by the appropriation of the philosophy of language. We will present a description of this system and raise questions about coherence and meaning.

Senior Seminar in Indian Religions

This series of regular seminars brings together scholars and students working on Indic philosophies and religions. It focuses on topics of current research: in each session, two people will present a context they are investigating for 20min, and then open it for discussion on key questions. All researchers, graduates and finalists in all areas are welcome to join.

Solving Metaphysical Mysteries: The archaeology of arguments in Vedantic texts

Week 3, Wednesday 1st February, 3.00-4.00
OCHS Library
Lead by Dr Jessica Frazier

The intellectual history of Indian philosophical schools presents fascinating puzzles of periodisation and mutual influence. But relatively little has been done to excavate the philosophical arguments in Vedantic texts and examine them on their own philosophical merits. In this short seminar discussion, we will dig out arguments for Brahman in a Vedantic text, and untangle their implications

Tantric Meditation and Phenomenology

Week 7, Wednesday 1st March, 3.00-4.00
OCHS Library
Lead by Professor Gavin Flood

This seminar will discuss meditation on ‘the sky of consciousness’ (cidgagana) in Krama texts, identified with the Goddess, and will consider Phenomenology as an approach to understanding this material. If there needs to be an adequation between approach or method and intellectual object, what are the advantages and/or disadvantages of Phenomenology?

Netra Tantra seminar

Week 7, Tuesday 28th February, 10.00-15.30
Venue: Campion Hall (10.00-12.45) and Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (14.00-15.30)
Convenor: Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen

Timetable and Abstracts

10.00-10.15   Welcome
Professor Gavin Flood, FBA
Campion Hall

10.15-11.00   The Netratantra: Its Vision and Themes
Professor Gavin Flood, FBA
Campion Hall

The Netratantra, the ‘Tantra of the Eye’, is an important tantric text in Kashmir and Nepal, dating from around the early ninth century, and widely disseminated during the eleventh and probably tenth centuries. The text takes its name from Śiva as Netranātha or ‘Lord of the Eye’. However, the text is a ‘universal’ (sarvasāmānya-) tantra, which overrides the distinctions between various tantric traditions. The central deity of the Netratantra is Amṛteśvara, whose consort is Lakṣmī/Śrī called Amṛtalakṣmī in ritual manuals based on the text. After an initial chapter in which Amṛteśvara, referred to as Bhairava, responds to the questions of the Goddess by extolling the virtues and powers of Śiva’s eye, the text presents a number of visualisations of a number of deities, catholic in its range, not only from the systems of the Mantramārga but from Vaiṣṇava traditions as well. Furthermore, a strong Śākta influence is evident in the text with its many references to female deities and practices characteristic of the Kulamārga, e.g. chapter 7 on the subtle visualising meditation and chapter 20 on yoginīs.

Professor Gavin Flood FBA (Oxford), Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen (Oxford) and Dr Rajan Khatiwoda (Heidelberg) are currently working on a fully annotated translation of the Netratantra with an introduction in two volumes in the Routledge Studies in Tantric Traditions series. The project to study the text will especially focus on the theme of models of the person or self that the text entails. Based on close philological reading, we hope to account for different understandings of the person implicit in the text.

Gavin Flood is a Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion in the Theology and Religion Faculty and academic director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Gavin read Religious Studies and Social Anthropology at Lancaster University and taught at the universities of Wales (Lampeter) and Stirling before coming to Oxford. He was elected to membership of the British Academy in 2014. His research interests are in medieval Hindu texts (especially from the traditions of Śiva), comparative religion, and phenomenology. He is general series editor of the Oxford History of Hinduism and currently developing closer textual work on the Netratantra.

11.00-11.15   Tea and Coffee

11.15-12.00   Digital Humanities and Hindu Studies: Building a Śākta Manuscript Database
Dr Ulrik Lyngs, Michael Elison
Campion Hall

New tools from the digital humanities hold considerable promise to augment traditional scholarly analysis in Hindu Studies. Compared to traditional workflows in which scholars manually collate, compare and critically edit manuscripts into edited volumes, computational methods allow many time-consuming tasks to be automated, and new understandings and insights based on the analysis of large volumes of text can be obtained that would previously have been impossible.
In this talk, I present our work-in-progress on an OCHS Manuscript Database using the Netra Tantra as an example. This database will make thousands of manuscripts available, drawn from the OCHS Kathmandu digitisation project, the National Archives of Nepal, the ASA archives, and more. Compared to existing major manuscript databases such as the Cambridge Digital Library, our database will offer a more advanced interface which, for example, allow users to see transliterated and translated texts side-by-side with images of the original manuscripts. Over time, the database will include computational tools that allow easy textual analysis and concordance, and automatic generating of formatted PDFs or Word files with customised content of specific manuscripts.
 
Ulrik Lyngs is a Carlsberg Foundation Oxford Visiting at the University of Oxford’s Human Centred Computing group, and a Junior Research Fellow of Linacre College. He has a highly interdisciplinary background, with a PhD in Computer Science (University of Oxford), an MA in the study of religion and cognitive psychology (Aarhus University), and an MSc in evolutionary anthropology (University of Oxford). His PhD research on attention and self-regulation in human-computer interactions received the Doctoral Prize from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. He has previously been a producer at HowTheLightGetsIn, the world’s largest philosophy and music festival.

12.00-12.30   Readings in the Netratantra: Chapter 7 on Subtle Visualising Meditation (sūkṣmadhyāna)
Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen
Campion Hall

The lecture will present a reading and discussion of significant passages from the Netratantra’s chapter 7 on subtle visualising meditation. The chapter is significant in that it presents two different anthropologies and systems of visualization, which the Trika commentator Kṣemarāja refers to as the tantric system (tantraprakriyā) and the Kula system (kulaprakriyā). As opposed to the more body-rejecting practices of classical yoga, the Kula system or what may be termed a ‘Śākta anthropology’ of tantric yoga aims at the affirmation and divinization of the body. This Śākta model of the human is first mentioned in the Netratantra’s chapter 7 on subtle visualising meditation (sūkṣmadhyāna). The Netratantra is also the first to mention the Kulamārga and to teach a system of six bodily centers called cakras, which the meditating yogi is supposed to pierce with his inherent power or śakti. This Śākta anthropology is introduced in the first few verses of chapter seven and then elaborated. The text presents an early Śākta appropriation of older yogic models of ‘knots’ (granthis), ‘supports’ (ādhāras) etc. foregrounding the central channel (suṣumnā) and the notion of how the yogi causes the ascent of his inner power as an early form of kuṇḍalinīyoga. Furthermore, the yogi’s inner power (śakti) was also conceived of in terms of sound or inner vibration (nādasūcī, ‘the needle of sound’).

Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen is Research Lecturer at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and a member of the Theology and Religion Faculty where he teaches Sanskrit, Pali and Indian religions. He is the research director and manager for the Śākta Traditions research programme. His book publications include an introduction to Hinduism (2015), translations of the Bhagavadgītā (2009) and the Haṭhapradīpikā (2022) as well as a Danish Sanskrit Grammar and Reader in two volumes (2014). He is the editor of Goddess Traditions in Tantric Hinduism (2016) and has written a number of articles on Śāktism, yoga and meditation in Danish, German and English. He is currently working on several book projects, including an English translation and annotated edition of the Netratantra (based on the oldest available Nepalese manuscript, NAK MS 1-285, NGMPP Reel No. B 25/5 from 1200 CE) in two volumes for the Routledge Tantric Studies series together with Dr Rajan Khatiwoda and Professor Gavin Flood.

12.30-13.00   Tradition of Manuscript Production: Nepalese Recension of the Netratantra in the National Archives of Nepal
Dr Rajan Khatiwoda
Campion Hall
 
Not only has the Kathmandu Valley preserved an ancient compendium of Suśruta (Suśrutasaṃhitā) copied in 878 CE, but also the earliest surviving Śaiva text, Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā copied sometime in the 9th century. Similarly, the National Archives of Nepal houses a well-preserved recension of the Netratantra ‘Tantra of the Eye’, an important text in Kashmir dating from around the early ninth century. Of the four Nepalese Netra-manuscripts, the oldest ‘Mṛtyujidamṛtīśavidhāna’ was copied in 1200 CE. The second oldest ‘Amṛteśvarapūjana’ was commissioned by Abhaya Malla in 1216 CE, most likely to protect his father, King Ari Malla, who was said to be dying. The lecture will attempt to shed light on the manuscript sources (as well as their scribal and palaeographical features) for the study of the Netatrantra.
 
Rajan Khatiwoda currently holds the position of Chief Scientific Documentation Coordinator in the Nepal Heritage Documentation Project (NHDP) at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (HAdW). He is also the Honorary Leader of the Kathmandu Office of the Śākta Traditions Project run under the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (OCHS) and a Research Fellow at OCHS affiliated with the Śākta Traditions research programme. Khatiwoda studied Classical Indology at Heidelberg University, from where he received his PhD in 2017. His dissertation deals with the formation and enforcement of the Mulukī Ain, Nepal’s first legal code promulgated in 1854. From 2013 to 2016, he was part of the Cluster´s Project A14 “Transcultural Legal Flows in 18th- and 19th-Century South Asia.” Since 2014, Khatiwoda is research associate at the South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University, and the Research Unit “Documents on the History of Religion and Law of Pre-modern Nepal,” Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Previously, he worked as a research assistant and cataloguer for the Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project (NGMCP) and the Nepal Research Centre (NRC) in Kathmandu for nine years (2004–2013).
 
13.00-14.30   Lunch (on your own)

14.30-15.00   Book presentation and reception:
Goddess Traditions in India: Theological Poems and Philosophical Tales in the Tripurārahasya (Routledge Hindu Studies Series)
Dr Silvia Schwarz Linder
OCHS Library

This new book on the Tripurārahasya, a South Indian Sanskrit work which occupies a unique place in the Śākta literature, is a study of the Śrīvidyā and Śākta traditions in the context of South Indian intellectual history in the late middle ages. Associated with the religious tradition known as Śrīvidyā and devoted to the cult of the Goddess Tripurā, the text was probably composed between the 13th and the 16th century CE. The analysis of its narrative parts addresses questions about the relationships between Tantric and Purāṇic goddesses. The discussion of its philosophical and theological teachings tackles problems related to the relationships between Sākta and Śaiva traditions. The stylistic devices adopted by the author(s) of the work deal uniquely with doctrinal and ritual elements of the Śrīvidyā through the medium of a literary and poetic language. This stylistic peculiarity distinguishes the Tripurārahasya from many other Tantric texts, characterized by a more technical language.

Silvia Schwarz Linder has a PhD in South Asian Studies (University of Vienna). She has lectured in the past at the Leopold-Franzens-Universität in Innsbruck and at the University Ca’ Foscari in Venice. She was Research Associate at the Institut für Indologie und Zentralasienwissenschaften of the University of Leipzig, and is currently Research Fellow at the OCHS. Her interests focus on the Tantric religious traditions of the Śrīvidyā and of the Pāñcarātra, specifically on the philosophical and theological doctrines expressed in the relevant South Indian Sanskrit textual traditions. She has also translated into Italian texts from the Sanskrit narrative and devotional literature, for editions aimed at a general readership.

15.00   Reception

Lecture List Michaelmas Term 2022

Lecture List Michaelmas Term 2022

Posted on by surabhi

Lecture List
Michaelmas Term 2022

Sunday 9 October 2022 — Saturday 3 December 2022

Hinduism 1

Weeks 1-8, Friday 4.00-5.00 PM 
Dr Rembert Lutjeharms 

These lectures offer a thematic and historical introduction to the sources and development of Hindu traditions from their early formation to the medieval period. We will explore the formation of Hindu traditions through textual sources, such as the Vedas, Upaniṣads and Bhagavad Gītā, along with the practices and social institutions that formed classical Hindu traditions. The lectures will include an introduction to Hindu philosophy. 

Sanskrit and Pali Prelims

Week 1-8, Wednesday 4.30-5.30, Friday 10.00-12.00
OCHS Library 
Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen  

The course provides an introduction to Sanskrit for the preliminary paper of the Theology and Religion Faculty in Elementary Sanskrit. Students of Pali will join the Sanskrit course in Michaelmas Term and for the first four weeks of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term, Sanskrit and Pali will be taught as two separate courses, i.e. Sanskrit Prelims and Pali for Sanskritists.

Sanskrit Prelims: A range of relevant Hindu and Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment in the Sanskrit course. The class is designed to introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Sanskrit grammar, syntax, and vocabulary and its importance for the exegesis of Sanskrit texts. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. By the end of the course students will have gained a basic competency in translating classical Sanskrit and reading relevant passages from texts such as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, the Bhagavadgītā, the Haṭhayogapradīpikā and the Buddhist Heart Sūtra. The course book will be Walter Maurer’s The Sanskrit Language. Sanskrit Prelims continues throughout Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and for the first four weeks of Trinity. 

Pali Prelims: The Pali course is designed to provide an easy philological introduction to Pali Buddhist texts via Sanskrit and introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Pali grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. A range of relevant Pali Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment. We will read classical Theravāda Buddhist discourses from the Pāli Canon such as the Fire Sermon (Ādittapariyāya-sutta) and Dependent Origination (Paṭiccasamuppāda) as well as passages from the Dhammapadaand the Jātaka tales. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. The course book will be Dines Andersen, A Pāli Reader and Pali Glossary, 2 vols. (1901) supplemented by Rune E. A. Johansson, Pali Buddhist Texts: An Introductory Reader and Grammar (1981).   

Pali students will attend the same ‘Sanskrit and Pali’ classes as Sanskrit students in Michaelmas Term and weeks 1-4 of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term, Pali and Sanskrit students will study in separate classes.  

Readings in Vedānta

Week 1-8, Thursday 10.00-11.00
OCHS Library 
Dr Rembert Lutjeharms (rembert@ochs.org.uk)

Vedānta—theology grounded in the systematic exegesis of the Upaniṣads—has for centuries been the primary discourse for Vaiṣṇava thought. These reading sessions are intended for students who have at least an introductory knowledge of Sanskrit and are interested in Vedānta texts. This term we will be reading Madhva’s Anuvyākhyāna, his principal commentary on the Brahma-sūtras. 

Readings in Phenomenology

(Mondays weeks 1-8, 11.00)
OCHS Library
Professor Gavin Flood FBA

Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century, and it has also had a deep impact on other theoretical fields more widely conceived. This term we will read Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute (Fordham University Press, 2004). 

Lectures: A Phenomenology of Holiness:

Thursdays weeks 1, 3, 5, 7, 2.00-3.00,  
OCHS Library 
Professor Gavin Flood FBA

These lectures will inquire into what we mean by ‘holiness’ by focussing on discussion in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. This is not a theological inquiry but an anthropological and philosophical inquiry that seeks to argue for the necessity of understanding human life in terms of holiness and for understanding holiness in terms of human life.

Lecture 1: Holiness and Scholastic Philosophy

To begin our inquiry and to begin to develop a phenomenology of holiness, we need some sense of context and the history of what is at stake, who has been concerned about the question and why. In this opening lecture I wish to focus on history through a question that will emerge as central to a phenomenology of holiness, namely what is the intellectual object of a phenomenology of holiness and the related question as to the being of holiness, whether it can be understood analogically or univocally? These issues go back a long way into medieval Scholasticism. The question has been traditionally couched in terms of natural and supernatural knowledge, concerning whether God is an object of the intellect, and whether the intellect can know God either naturally through Philosophy or supernaturally through Theology. This is not an entirely arcane debate as the category of the holy mutates out of this discussion into a philosophical discourse and thence into a methodological discussion in the science of religion about its object. We will pay particular attention to Duns Scotus. 

Lecture 2: Is Holiness Outside of Language?

Two issues are important, for whom is holiness and appearance and of what? In this lecture we will focus on the for whom. The existential experience of holiness necessitates an approach that simultaneously describes it and explains it at one level. In locating holiness in feeling, Rudolf Otto implicitly placed the experience of holiness outside of language. Yet if language is constitutive of human reality and not only descriptive of it, then what does it mean to claim that an experience of holiness could be pre-linguistic and prior to language? To address this question, we need to go back to some basic claims of phenomenology and try to build a new understanding sensitive to the constitutive view that has had such profound impact on the Humanities while at the same time recognising pre-linguistic, somatic experience as the ground upon which the linguistically constitutive view can be formulated. We need to consider Husserl’s intentionality, Heidegger’s Dasein, as well as Romano’s pre-linguistic experience.  

Lecture 3: The Politics of Holiness

A different theoretical trajectory understands holiness in political terms and reduces holiness to a purely transactional notion constructed within a power dynamic that has played out through the history of civilization, to its cost. On this view, we must understand holiness primarily as a legal category. In this lecture we will examine a philosophical anthropology of the political human that begins, as Esposito argues glossing Schmitt, with a negation, with a lack: the lack being that which is sought after, perhaps possessed by the other, in a process starting from enmity. This negation that is the beginning of politics is articulated in legal systems at the root of the Western tradition in Roman law where, as Esposito observes, a free human being was defined negatively as someone who is not a slave, being under one’s own legal authority. Agamben goes further to bring holiness purely within the political realm and claims that holiness as sacrality, ‘the sacred man’ (homo sacer) is defined negatively as the category of the man who can be killed but not sacrificed: namely the state of exception. But is this to ignore holiness as verticality and openness?

Lecture 4: The Metaphysics of Holiness

We have so far mostly addressed the questions for whom holiness is an appearance and partly addressed the question of what holiness is an appearance. Raising the first question has taken us into an argument that holiness is integral to human being-in-the-world, revealed in terms of a comportment towards verticality and in terms of comportment towards others. This also entails a phenomenology of culture and the ways in which verticality is accessed through symbolic forms or cultural nodal points that provide locations of elevation. We now need to address the question of what holiness is an appearance through an account of ways of being holy and developing an ontology of holiness that is metaphysically realist but can only be accessed indirectly. If the languages of holiness are languages of holiness, what metaphysical commitments does this entail?

Lectures of the Shivdasani Visiting Fellow

Visualization in Some Bengali Hindu Contemplative Traditions: Vaishnava bhakti, Shakta Tantra, Baul songs and Raja Yoga

Week 4, Thursday 3rd November, 2.00-3.00 
OCHS Library
Join via zoom from here.
Dr June McDaniel

Visualization is an important practice in many Bengali religious traditions.  For Gaudiya Vaishnavas, we can explore two styles of visualization:  creating one’s own spiritual body in the form of a young girl or manjari and creating one’s inner body in the form of a young devotee of the saint Caitanya Mahaprabhu, as the gaur deha.  The devotee must transmute the substance of instinct or kama into a more condensed form of divine love or prema.  For Shaktas, we have tantric visualization of the cakras and bodily channels of energy, which allows cleansing of the elements (bhutasuddhi), and the ritual placement of deities into parts of the body (nyasa), leading towards union with the deities.  For Bauls, the inner body is visualized as a place:  a garden, a house, a birdcage, a whole landscape with rivers, ponds and mountains.  For Sahajiyas or Vaishnava Bauls, the inner body is seen as both the emanation of a deity (Radha for women, Krishna for men) and a network of centers of power.  In raja yoga, the siddhis or supernatural powers are developed through samyama, in which visualization acts within the practices of dharana, dhyana and samadhi (shifting one’s focus from external to internal, subtle objects).  In all of these cases, visualization brings a special form of altered perception (siddha-darshana) and acts as a technique for inner exploration. 

The Modern Loss of Ecstasy in Religion and Theology

Week 6, Thursday 17th November, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Dr June McDaniel

The study of mystical and ecstatic experience is out of fashion these days in the field of Religious Studies in the USA.  Analysis of religious consciousness has been obscured by the interest in politics, history and sociology.  The themes for meetings of the American Academy of Religion over the last few years have focused on Racism, Social Justice, Climate Change and Covid-19.  There is little interest in what we might call the ‘inner dimension’ of religious experience.  The modern study of ecstatic religious consciousness over the last thirty to forty years has largely been a study of objections to its subject matter.   

We see this in Theology as well as Religious Studies.  The general Religious Studies response to mystical experience has been that it should be left to the theologians.  But the theologians don’t want it either- they are attempting to show that they are historians, linguists, and ethicists, as well as voices for social change.  The study of mystical and ascetical theology has been largely de-emphasized in modern seminaries.  Like the religionists, theologians have shifted their interests to the social and political world, often substituting classes in practical skills like small-business organization, finance, leadership and preaching skills.  Ecstasy is the “hot potato” that no field wants.  As the Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast has recently noted, “Every religion seems to begin in mysticism and end in politics.”  He compares mystical states to the hot lava of a volcano, and organized religion to the dry crust and ash that forms as it cools, settles and loses energy.  In a similar way, he notes that the volcanic passions of mystical states turn into the organized religious institutions that show the symptoms of “rigor mortis.”

This paper will describe what is gained, and lost, by this limiting of religious inquiry.  It will also discuss how ecstasy has been relocated into a variety of secular areas- violence, sexuality, music, sports.  Ecstasy has lost its link with religion, and here we will explore how and why this has happened. 

Dr June McDaniel is Professor Emerita in the field of History of Religions, in the Dept. of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston, in the USA. She is the author of three books on India, a co-edited volume on mysticism, a co-edited volume on Hindu religious experience, a book on current views of ecstasy in the field of Religious Studies, and many articles. Her MTS was in Theological Studies from Emory University, and her PhD was in History of Religions from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She spent two years in India, on grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies and as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar.  She also did research in Indonesia on a Collaborative International Research Grant from the American Academy of Religion, as well as on shorter research trips. 

Lectures of the J.P. And Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow

The luminous ātman within: Beliefs about afterlife and voluntary death of sages in the Sanskrit epics

Week 3, Thursday, 27th October, 11.00-12.00.  
OCHS Library
Valters Negribs

This lecture will explore a body of non-systematic beliefs about the death and afterlife of virtuous persons in the Sanskrit epics. Many epic passages depict a Brahmin or warrior sage who exists after death in a luminous form in heaven, as a star, having entered the sun, or flying around in a luminous vimāna (flying palace-chariot). In the Sanskrit epics this usually happens to highly virtuous characters who have purified themselves through such practices as tapas or the observance of dharmic conduct. The lecture will sketch a possible historical development, noting that in the majority of epic passages the luminous afterlife of sages is not associated with yoga, whereas in some passages that are likely to be later the means of extracting a luminous self (ātman) from the body are portrayed as yogic techniques. 

The relationship between āsana (posture), sukha (bliss), and meditation in early yoga

Week 5, Thursday, 10th November, 11.00-12.00.  
OCHS Library
Valters Negribs

This lecture will explore the ascetic background of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra passage that deals with āsana (2.46-2.48) and offer a new interpretation of that passage. It will argue that Patañjali participates in an earlier discourse on overcoming the hardships of prolonged meditation and ascetic life in the wilderness by using meditative techniques to suffuse one’s body with a pleasant feeling or bliss (sukha) that cancels out the pain (duḥkha) which might otherwise be felt. Such a discourse linking āsana, sukha, and meditation is found primarily in the early Buddhist literature.

Valters Negribs studied social anthropology, study of religions, and traditions of yoga and meditation at SOAS (University of London) before coming to Oxford to work on a doctoral thesis “Ascetic teachings for householder kings in the Mahābhārata”. Valters joins the OCHS as a visiting fellow while waiting for his viva. After a successful defence of the doctoral thesis he will begin a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellowship with Groupe de Recherches en Etudes Indiennes (Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3/ EPHE), working on “Ascetic literature in early Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina traditions”.

Other Lectures

Śākta Traditions Lecture Series

The Body of the Goddess

Week 8, Tuesday 29th November, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Professor Diwakar Acharya 

This talk will explore a Vedic myth of the birth of Śrī — the goddess of excellence, her immediate exploitation by the gods, and subsequent restitution of her bodily possessions through Vedic rituals. It will compare this myth with the Devīmāhātmya myth of creation of the body of the goddess through the contribution of various gods of their powers, and then reflect on the motives and ideas embedded in these two myths. It will also explore the concepts of mantric, geophysical, and micro- and macro-cosmic bodies of the goddess, together with the shades of her beauty from devotional contexts. 

Diwakar Acharya is Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at All Souls College, University of Oxford. His research concerns religious and philosophical traditions of South Asia. He studies ancient and medieval texts, inscriptions, and other historical documents significant for the cultural history of the Indian sub-continent. He is also interested in the critical examination of rites, rituals, and customs of the Indian religions and a keen reader of various genres of Sanskrit literature, starting from the Vedas. 

Pali reading Group

Week 1-8, Wednesdays, 3.00-4.00 (GMT)
OCHS Library
Valters Negribs, Shree Nahata

The informal weekly Pāli reading group aims to bring together scholars and students alike to read and discuss Pāli texts. Attendees will have the opportunity to take turns reading the selected text and engage in lively discussion.

This term we will be reading verses from the Dhammapada along with the Aṭṭhakathā commentary. The commentary provides a narrative frame which explains the circumstances under which the Dhammapada verse was spoken by the Buddha. We will focus on those stories where the Dhammapada verses are said to have been spoken for the benefit of laymen. The Dhammapada has been recognised to contain much general wisdom that is not particularly Buddhist or does not directly pertain to the Buddhist path to awakening. This wisdom literature provides a key link between early Buddhism and texts from other traditions such as the Mahābhārata.

The text of the Dhammapada Aṭṭhakathā can be accessed here.

To join via Zoom, please contact the organisers.
Contact: valters.negribs@wolfson.ox.ac.uk or shree.nahata@balliol.ox.ac.uk

Pre-Requisites: 

  1. Prior knowledge of either Pāli or Sanskrit. Students of Sanskrit should consult Geiger’s A Pāli Grammar [https://archive.org/details/apaligrammarwilhelmgeiger_202003_741_P] to learn the chief differences between Sanskrit and Pāli. Given their similar grammar and vocabulary, the transition from Sanskrit to Pāli, with a little effort, should not be too difficult. 
  2. Curiosity to learn more about Buddhism and Pāli! 

Valters Negribs is a visiting fellow at the OCHS. He works on ascetic literature in Ancient India, with a focus on the Mahābhārata. Shree Nahata is a DPhil student working on Indian philosophy.