[INDOLOGY] Gandhāra Corpora Lecture Series: Stefan Baums, June 18 2025 @17.00 CET, UGent and Online

[Charles DiSimone]

Hi Madhav,

We are recording the talks but for the time being they will remain
internal. However, we will eventually put up on the project website (not
live yet) those from speakers who are willing.

I hope you will have a good trip to the UK tomorrow!
Charles

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


On Mon, Jun 9, 2025 at 4:51 PM Madhav Deshpande <mmdesh at umich.edu> wrote:

> I hope these talks will be recorded and made available later.
>
> Madhav M. Deshpande
> Professor Emeritus, Sanskrit and Linguistics
> University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
> Senior Fellow, Oxford Center for Hindu Studies
> Adjunct Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India
>
> [Residence: Campbell, California, USA]
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 9, 2025 at 7:40 AM Charles DiSimone via INDOLOGY <
> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>
>> Dear Friends,
>>
>> I am pleased to invite you to the third talk in the Gandhāra Corpora
>> Lecture Series with a talk by Dr. Stefan Baums (LMU). Details here
>> <https://www.cbs.ugent.be/guestlecture/guest-lecture-gandhari-manuscripts-and-inscriptions-maintaining-and-analyzing-a-comprehensive-corpus-by-stefan-baums-june-18-2025/>
>> and below.
>>
>> (Also, a reminder that the second talk in the series will be held
>> tomorrow, Lewis Doney: “A Corpus of Ritual Literature from Dunhuang and its
>> Links Further West”, June 10, 2025. Details here
>> <https://www.cbs.ugent.be/guestlecture/guest-lecture-a-corpus-of-ritual-literature-from-dunhuang-and-its-links-further-west-by-lewis-doney-june-10-2025/>
>> )
>>
>> *Title*: GĀNDHĀRĪ MANUSCRIPTS AND INSCRIPTIONS: MAINTAINING AND
>> ANALYZING A COMPREHENSIVE CORPUS
>>
>> *Speaker*: Stefan Baums, University of Munich
>>
>> *Timing*: Wednesday, June 18, 2025 @17.00
>>
>> *Location*: Faculteitszaal, Blandijn faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte,
>> Ghent University (Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent) In-person and ONLINE
>>
>> Both talks are in person and online. All are welcome. Please register for
>> the series through this Google Form: https://forms.gle/TwffQCPuVipUpMvk6
>> <https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fforms.gle%2FTwffQCPuVipUpMvk6&data=05%7C02%7CMariia.Lepneva%40UGent.be%7C3cb6c468031b4ded2a9608dd8d77ac53%7Cd7811cdeecef496c8f91a1786241b99c%7C1%7C0%7C638822267736942779%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=gyiWO1MB0D0%2FKOT1qkbWj7F%2BZXjoz5YIwt1veZUFPsE%3D&reserved=0>
>>
>> *Abstract*:
>>
>> Gandhāra is known not only for its unique material culture, representing
>> a confluence of Hellenistic and South Asian elements, but also for the
>> wealth of ancient inscriptions and manuscripts in the local Gāndhārī
>> language and Kharoṣṭhī script that it produced and preserved for us. Many
>> of the inscriptions are from Buddhist contexts, including a large number of
>> donative records, and some contain valuable historical information about
>> the population and rulers of Gandhāra through history. Most ancient
>> manuscripts from Gandhāra have come to light only in the last thirty years,
>> and are the subject of intense ongoing research. They are the oldest
>> Buddhist and the oldest South Asian manuscripts preserved, and very close
>> to the beginning of written literature in South Asia. Beyond Gandhāra
>> itself, Gāndharī manuscripts and inscriptions were produced far into the
>> Indian subcontinent, up to Bamiyan in the west, in the kingdoms of Khotan,
>> Krorayina, and Kucha along the Silk Roads, and among expatriate Buddhist
>> communities in China. The Gāndhārī documentary corpus thus tells the story
>> of the export of a writing culture, of its texts, and of the ideas that
>> they conveyed across large parts of Asia, and is of unique interest for the
>> historiography of Buddhism and Asian civilization. It is also a very
>> diverse corpus, produced over more than five hundred years, comprising many
>> different document types, and written in a broad range of scribal hands,
>> orthographies, and dialects ranging from Middle Indian to Sanskrit.
>> Beginning in 2002, Andrew Glass and the present speaker have been compiling
>> a text-image corpus of all Gāndhārī documents on the website Gandhari.org
>> <https://gandhari.org/>, currently numbering 2,858 items and continually
>> updated. In addition to presenting the documents in both their material and
>> textual aspects, they catalog and analyze them in various ways, including
>> the a dictionary of the Gāndhārī language, currently numbering 10,125
>> articles and firmly establishing Gāndhārī as one of the major languages of
>> Buddhism and modern Buddhist scholarship. This lecture will introduce the
>> corpus of Gāndhārī documents from Gandhāra and beyond, discuss the
>> particular challenges that their study individually and as a whole
>> presents, the solutions that have been adopted, and some discoveries made
>> along the way.
>>
>> *Bio*:
>>
>> Stefan Baums teaches at the Institute for Indology and Tibetology of the
>> University of Munich and serves as lead researcher of the Buddhist
>> Manuscripts from Gandhāra project at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and
>> Humanities. Before joining the University of Munich, he held positions at
>> the University of Copenhagen, the University of Washington, the University
>> of California, Berkeley, and Leiden University. His research interests
>> include Buddhist philology and epigraphy, classical Sanskrit court
>> literature, the development of Buddhist hermeneutics, and the description
>> of Gāndhārī language and literature. His current work focuses on the
>> decipherment and edition of four Gāndhārī manuscripts containing
>> commentaries on early Buddhist verses and the Saṃgītisūtra and a study of
>> the historical connections and exegetical principles of this group of
>> texts. He is editor of the Dictionary of Gāndhārī, co-editor of the
>> Gandhāran Buddhist Texts series, academic lead of the Research Environment
>> for Ancient Documents (READ) software development project, and epigraphist
>> for the Italian Archeological Mission in Pakistan.
>> With my best wishes,
>> Charles DiSimone
>>
>> Prof. Dr. Charles DiSimone
>> Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies & Indology
>> Department of Languages and Cultures
>> Ghent University
>>
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