Category: Lecture

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.

Śākta Traditions Lecture Series | Professor Sanderson

Śākta Traditions Lecture Series | Professor Sanderson

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Śākta Traditions Lecture Series: Śāktism among the Śaivas

Prof. Alexis Sanderson
21 & 28 October 2020, 2.00-3.00
 
In the first of these three lectures Professor Sanderson covers the history of Śaivism, setting out his view of its principal divisions, their historical development, and their interaction, and locating on this map the entry point of an influx of Śākta Śaiva forms of ecstatic religion into what had previously been a cluster of austere, highly ascetic traditions. In the second he narrows his focus to examine the history of Śaivism in Kashmir, concentrating on the nature of its Śākta Śaiva elements, notably the traditions of the Trika and Krama, but stressing the importance of seeing how these were embedded within, and interacted with, more exoteric forms of the religion. In the third lecture, he presents evidence that these Śākta Śaiva traditions developed and flourished outside Kashmir in most regions of the subcontinent and that though much of their later highbrow literature was modelled on the learned exegesis of Abhinavagupta and Ksemarāja there are reasons to conclude that they had pre-Kashmirian histories.
 
Link to handout for lecture 1 & 2: download
Link to handout for lecture 3: download