Date and time: May 31, 2019 (Fri.), 16:00-17:30

Venue: 2nd Conference Room, 3rd floor, IASA

Speaker: Shayne Clarke, McMaster University

Abstract:
The nearly 3,000 Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts now preserved in the Stein and Pelliot Collections contain some of the earliest known witnesses (8th to 9th centuries CE) to the monastic legal traditions that entered Tibet from India. Containing numerous otherwise unattested and still unstudied texts, they are invaluable for the study of both early-medieval Indian and early Tibetan Buddhism, to say nothing of Dunhuang Buddhism. Despite the obvious scholarly value of these manuscripts, to date there has been no comprehensive study of the monastic law codes preserved in the Dunhuang manuscripts. Indeed, scholars are still left to rely on brief, often inaccurate, rather vague catalogue entries, many of which were written nearly a century ago.

TAs part of a multi-year project sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, I am currently compiling a comprehensive catalogue of the Dunhuang Vinaya material preserved in Tibetan. In this lecture, I will introduce a number of previously overlooked Vinaya texts belonging to the Mūlasarvāstivādin tradition with the hope of shedding new light on a number of old problems.

Contact: norihisa[at]ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp