Lectures Archive - Page 12 of 204 - Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies

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Sanskrit and Pali Prelims 2, XII (HT23)

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), IV (HT23)

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).

Explicit metaphysics of Non-Dual Śaivism (HT23)

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 3: Explicit metaphysics of Non-Dual Śaivism

Week 8, 9thMarch, 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.

Sanskrit and Pali Prelims 2, XI (HT23)

Pali prelims (Pali for sanskritists), III (HT23)

Readings in Phenomenology, VI (HT23)

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.

Hinduism 2: Modern Hinduism, V (HT23)

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, X (HT23)

Pali prelims (Pali for sanskritists), II (HT23)

9 Rooms: Philip Rawson and the exhibiting of tantra (HT23)

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.

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.