[INDOLOGY] Gandhāra Corpora Lecture Series: Lewis Doney "A Corpus of Ritual Literature from Dunhuang and its Links Further West" June 10, 2025

[Charles DiSimone]

Dear Friends,

I am pleased to announce the second speaker in the Gandhāra Corpora Lecture
Series, an ongoing guest speaker series that is part of the ERC funded
*Gandhāra
Corpora Project*
<https://research.flw.ugent.be/en/projects/corpora-greater-gandh%C4%81ra-tracing-development-buddhist-textuality-and-gilgitbamiyan>
.

*Title: *A Corpus of Ritual Literature from Dunhuang and its Links Further
West

*Speaker:* Lewis Doney
<https://www.dependency.uni-bonn.de/en/about-us/people/investigators/lewisdoney>,
University of Bonn

*Timing:* Tuesday, June 10, 2025 @17.00

*Location:* Ghent University, Faculteitszaal, Blandijn faculteit Letteren
en Wijsbegeerte (Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent)

In-person and ONLINE

All are welcome. Please register for the series through this Google Form:
https://forms.gle/TwffQCPuVipUpMvk6  <https://forms.gle/TwffQCPuVipUpMvk6>

*Abstract:*

The wealth of texts from the famous “Library Cave” or Cave 17 from Mogao
near Dunhuang, which was closed around the turn of the eleventh century,
offers scholars a time-capsule from the social and cultural world of
first-millennium CE Dunhuang, a melting pot with connections to China and
places farther west along the so-called Silk Road. It can also be used,
with caution, to compare religious practice there with what we know of
Buddhism at the court of the Tibetan emperors in the eighth and ninth
centuries especially. One aspect of this is what Arthur Waley termed
“Dhāraṇī Buddhism” in his 1931 work, A Catalogue of Paintings Recovered
from Tun-Huang by Sir Aurel Stein. This presentation will bring recent
advances in the study of the importance and changing nature of prayer in
Indic- and Chinese-language sources to bear on Pelliot tibétain 45, a
stitched concertina Tibetan-language manuscript from Dunhuang that consists
of a corpus of rituals dating to between the imperial and early
post-imperial period. In this presentation, I will identify some of the
dhāraṇīs and prayer texts found in this manuscript, with correlates
provided (in somewhat different forms) in the later Tibetan canons, discuss
the ritual uses of these texts evidenced in the manuscript’s marginalia,
and connect the literary and artistic additions in it to central Tibet,
Gilgit and South Asia during the first millennium.

*Bio:*
Lewis Doney is Professor of Tibetan Studies at the Rheinische
Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. He received his PhD (Study of
Religions) from SOAS, University of London, in 2011 and was then engaged in
postdoctoral research on early Tibetan life writing, empire and religion,
Tibetan relations with South Asia and their impact on social and labour
dependencies within Sino-Tibetan communities around Dunhuang, and later
southern Tibetan Buddhist historiography and ritual and their relations to
cultural identities and ecologies in the Himalayas. His publications
include a solo-authored monograph titled The Zangs gling ma: The First
Padmasambhava Biography (International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist
Studies, 2014), an edited volume, Bringing Buddhism to Tibet: History and
Narrative in the dBa’ bzhed Manuscript (De Gruyter, 2021) and a monograph
co-authored with Brandon Dotson: Producing Buddhist Sutras in Ninth-Century
Tibet: The Sutra of Limitless Life and its Dunhuang Copies Kept at the
British Library (De Gruyter, 2025).

Details may also be found 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/>
.


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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