[INDOLOGY] "Monastic Monsters: Historicizing Outcaste Characters in the Grotesquerie of Indian Buddhist Literature" Nicholas Witkowski, Oct 3 2024

[Charles DiSimone]

Dear Friends,

I am pleased to invite interested parties to the following talk by Nicholas
Witkowski (University of San Diego) organized by the Gandhāra Corpora
Project, South Asia Research Network Ghent, and Ghent Centre for Buddhist
Studies held in person and online at Ghent University. The talk will also
be streamed online and if you would like to participate in that way please
write me via email for the MS Teams link.

Title:
Monastic Monsters: Historicizing Outcaste Characters in the Grotesquerie of
Indian Buddhist Literature

Date and Time: October 3, 2024, at 16:00
Location: Faculteitszaal, Blandijn
faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte
Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent

Abstract:
This presentation forms one pillar of a broader project to write the
history of outcaste Buddhism drawing upon texts from the Buddhist legal
codes (Vinaya). There is an assumption, implicit in much of early Buddhist
material, as well as in much of modern scholarship, that Buddhism is
primarily an upper-caste affair. In other words, the field effectively
operates as though outcaste Buddhist communities lacked the agential
capacity to shape the institutional and soteriological landscape of South
Asian Buddhism. Articulating the contours of outcaste influence, or even
presence, can prove difficult, as many cases in the Vinaya tend to mask
caste status. In this presentation, I will focus on a particular Vinaya
case about a monastic monster—a sexually deviant figure—in order to propose
a methodological approach to reading for outcaste monastics. As
postcolonial studies of colonial literature have argued, the discourse of
sexual deviancy is often code for subaltern fugitivity—in this case,
fugitivity from the socio-economic fetters of caste. This presentation will
argue that we may read cases of sexual deviancy among monks in the Vinaya
as a discursive index of upper-caste anxiety about the presence of outcaste
communities in the monastery.

About the Speaker:
Nicholas Witkowski is Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies at the
University of San Diego. His current project, Lifestyles of Impurity, is a
study of low-/outcaste monastic communities in first millennium South Asia
that employs the theoretical armature of historians of the everyday. This
book project integrates feminist, Marxist, post-colonialist, and
Foucauldian literary-critical approaches to the study of textual sources
documenting the socio-religious practices of low-/outcaste communities.
What Dr. Witkowski hopes to convey is a nuanced articulation of the social
locations of marginality as wellsprings of cultural innovation that
continued to resist, challenge, and, in certain key respects, transform
Brahmanical imperial discourse and practice across the Sanskrit cosmopolis
throughout the first millennium CE.

Prof. Dr. Charles DiSimone
Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies
Department of Languages and Cultures
Ghent University
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