[INDOLOGY] Gandhāra Corpora Lecture Series: Alex Meng on Asuras in Aśvaghoṣa's oeuvre, May 07, 2026

[Charles DiSimone]

Dear Friends,

I am pleased to announce the next talk in the Gandhāra Corpora Lecture
Series, the last for the semester.

Title:
“Poet's Myths: Asuras in Aśvaghoṣa's Epics”
Speaker:
*Xiaoqiang "Alex" Meng*, Universiteit Leiden

Timing:
Thursday, May 30 @ 17.00 CET

Location:
Lokaal 3.30 - Camelot
Blandijn, Campus Boekentoren
9000 Gent, Belgium
(also online)

Abstract:
Asuras have long been depicted as primordial antagonistic beings in the
religious, mythological, and folkloric traditions of South Asia. Buddhism
engaged with these figures early on and regarded Asuras as warlike demons
perpetually in conflict with the gods. This gave rise to the Deva-Asura war
(*devāsurasaṃgrāma*) motif, which persisted throughout the history of
Buddhist literature. This talk focuses on how Aśvaghoṣa, the well-known
Buddhist poet, presents the Asuras in his epics, the *Buddhacarita* and
*Saundarananda*, at the beginning of the first millennium CE. Through close
readings of four sets of verses from these two works, we attempt to discern
the strategies and approaches by which early Indian Buddhists appropriated,
localized, and “domesticated” the figure of the Asura and the motif of the
Deva-Asura war. This further serves as a cultural, epistemic, and
intellectual backdrop for the development of the Buddhist cosmological
traditions and the *Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra*, of which the Asuras
and the Deva-Asura war are inevitable components.

Bio:
Meng "Alex" Xiaoqiang is a PhD candidate in South Asian and Tibetan Studies
at the Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands. He
received his BA in history (on Mongol-Yuan dynasty and maritime silk road
in the 13th–14th centuries) from Nankai University in 2017 and his MA in
Buddhist studies (on Kṣemendra’s *Bodhisattvāvadānakalpalatā*) from Fudan
University in 2020. Afterwards, he came to the Netherlands to pursue a PhD
degree in Buddhist Studies. Sponsored by Khyentse Foundation and the J.
Gonda Fund Foundation, he concentrated on Buddhist cosmology and mythology,
specifically on the myth of the war between the gods and the Asuras, based
on the Buddhist scripture *Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra*. He has also
studied in the program “MA in South Asian Languages and Cultures: Jainism
and its Languages” at Ghent University, and made an academic stay at the
Departments of Buddhology and Tibetology and Indian Studies (BTK), Eötvös
Loránd University, Budapest

All are welcome. The Gandhāra Corpora Lecture Series is in-person and
hybrid online. 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%7CCharles.DiSimone%40ugent.be%7Ce3757a7f934b49d4abd408de8c25cdd3%7Cd7811cdeecef496c8f91a1786241b99c%7C1%7C0%7C639102291413617398%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=JDry9qvv3cFjZh40MLLV4sBQrUNTJbCQkGKEVU3cgD4%3D&reserved=0>

(registering once will ensure you will receive links to all future talks in
the series)

The series will resume in the fall.

Friendly Greetings,
Charles DiSimone

Prof. Dr. Charles DiSimone
Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies & Indology
Department of Languages and Cultures
Ghent University
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20260505/09a5114b/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Alex Meng Poster 2026.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 732282 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20260505/09a5114b/attachment.pdf>