Concept Note for an International Conference to be organised by the Department of History, BB Ambedkar University, Lucknow, India (March 27-28 ,2014)
Indian Buddhism in Its Social Context: From Sakyamuni Buddha to the Present.
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In a significant section of Indian historiography, Buddhism is believed to be a world-negating soteriology of ‘asocial’ monks. It is also generally believed that beyond the monastic walls, it hardly had any social presence. When the Turkic invasions destroyed the big monastic centres of Indian Buddhism, Buddhism simply disappeared from the land of its birth. This approach fails to explain why a religion without any social relevance survived in India for more than fifteen hundred years and why it was reinvented, reformulated and adopted in the context of social reform movements in Colonial and Post-Colonial India. In contemporary India, we see that Buddhism has become an essential component of Dalit identity formulation, mobilisation and consolidation. That is another indication of the continuing social relevance of Buddhism in India.
For long, study of ancient Indian Buddhist religious institutions has been dominated by art historical concerns only. A more pertinent approach may be to see them as important constituents of the overall societal matrix, as institutions in dynamic interaction with other societal institutions, acting and reacting with them, influencing them and getting influenced by them in turn. That is to say, Buddhist institutions must be visualised as social institutions, in dynamic interaction with other societal institutions. Unfortunately, Indian Buddhism has not been studied much from this perspective.
This Conference hopes to be an endeavour in unravelling some aspects of the patterns of interactions between Buddhism (including Buddhist institutions) and other social institutions in India from Sakyamuni Buddha to the present. Papers are invited on the following themes:
1. Defining the ‘self ‘, defining the ‘other’: Did Indian Buddhism (Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana) had any notion of self? Or did it consider itself just as a soteriology for the world-renouncing monks? If it had some definite notions of the ‘self’, how did it negotiate ‘other’ or ‘others’? And what did it do nurture and cultivate the ‘self’? Did the Buddhist ‘self’ include the lay followers? That brings us to assess the relationship between the Buddhist Sangha and the laity.
2. Buddhism was one of the earliest world religions, yet it has developed remarkable local colours across the vast landmass of Asia. This ‘localization’ process, what has been earlier referred to as ‘translation in the local idiom’, has been well documented in the case of many Asian countries, but it has barely begun for India. Future researches on the functional dimensions of Indian monastic Buddhism may negotiate one core issue: how does the Saṅgha localize at a particular place by resolving what Richard Cohen calls ‘uniquely local problems’, yet retain its supra-local character? To analyse the twists and turns of this supralocal–local dialectic, shifting the focus away from the Ārya- caturdiśa-bhikṣu-saṅgha, (‘Universal) Noble Saṅgha of the Four Quarters’ to the individual monastery in its spatial context may not be a bad idea. This will naturally entail a greater use of archaeological data and archaeological fieldwork.
This approach forces us to revisit many established notions regarding the social bases of patronage to Indian Buddhism and Buddhist institutions. How did the monastic tradition localise at a particular place? How did it try to negotiate the local socio-economic, political and cultic situations? Once a Buddhist monastery or a stupa established its presence at a particular site, how did it mobilise resources for its survival? Which section of society patronised Buddhism and Buddhist institutions? With what motives? What did the Buddhist Sangha provide in return to its patrons? Are there spatial variations in the patterns of interactions between the Sangha and its patrons as one moves out of the middle and upper Ganga valley? How did Buddhist institutions survive without any kind of royal patronage in many cases?
3. Ancient Indian Buddhism and social hierarchies (Varna/Jati/ gender)
4. Patterns of interaction between Ancient Indian Buddhism and Indian political orders and processes.
5. Ancient Indian Buddhism and economic processes: craft production, trade, urbanisation, agriculture.
6. Buddhism and medicine in ancient India: textual and archaeological perspectives.
7. Socio-economic contexts of ancient Indian Buddhist art and architecture.
8. Archaeology and the reconstruction of social and economic history of ancient Indian Buddhism.
9. Role of pilgrimage in Indian Buddhism: textual, epigraphic and archaeological perspectives.
10. The social and economic philosophy of ancient Indian Buddhism
11. Buddhism and Environment
12. Decline of Indian Buddhism: socio-economic factors.
13. The social dimensions of Buddhist revival movements in colonial, post-colonial and contemporary India.
In this section, we are particularly interested in tracing the interface between the Dalit and backward castes identity movements and Buddhist revival movements. Why and how was Buddhism appropriated and reformulated by the Ambedkarite Dalits? What are the ideological and institutional aspects of Buddhist revival movements in post-Colonial and contemporary India? Do we see any variation in the patterns of Buddhist revival movements in different parts of India?
14. Any other theme related to the social dimensions of Indian Buddhism.
Paper submission
The length of your paper should be around ten thousand words. It should contain a short abstract and four or five key words. In the end, provide a detailed bibliography. Abstracts should be sent latest by 15th March, 2014. All abstracts and full papers shall be reviewed. You will be extended a formal invitation if your paper proposal is finally accepted.
We intend to invite around 30 scholars from different parts of India and abroad. We will like to ensure that papers cover all parts of India (including Pakistan and Bangladesh). Each scholar will be given 20 minutes to present his/her paper. That shall be followed by a discussion for 15 minutes.
Within 4 months of the date of the Conference, you will be required to submit the final copy of your paper. It is our intention to publish the selected papers from the Conference in the form of a book.
Accommodation
If your paper is accepted, we will provide local hospitality and accommodation for the Conference period to all outstation delegates.
Travelling allowance
If your paper proposal is accepted, we will provide 3AC rail fare for all Indian delegates and economy class return airfare to international delegates. We will not be able to reimburse Visa expenses. No DA will be provided.
Correspondence
Kindly direct all correspondence to either Prof. S.Victor Babu (Head of the Department of History, BBAU , Lucknow . Email : saragandlavb@gmail.com) or to Birendra Nath Prasad, Assistant Professor, History Deptt , BBAU , Lucknow . Email: bp2628@yahoo.com ). In your email, kindly do mention your contact number and institutional affiliation.
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On Mon, 3/10/14, indology-request@list.indology.info <indology-request@list.indology.info> wrote:
Subject: INDOLOGY Digest, Vol 14, Issue 10
To: indology@list.indology.info
Date: Monday, March 10, 2014, 9:30 PM
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Today's Topics:
1. Meter identifying tool --- The actual
usage and funcrion of
metres (Michael Hahn)
2. Dhauli Elephant (Artur Karp)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 17:05:21 +0100
From: Michael Hahn <hahn.m@t-online.de>
To: indology@list.indology.info
Subject: [INDOLOGY] Meter identifying tool --- The actual
usage and
funcrion of metres
Message-ID: <20140309170519.09C3.CF0E9E7@t-online.de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Many thanks to Prof. Kulkarni's hint of the valuable meter
identifying
tool, which greatly facilitates the task of the
inexperienced student. In
this connection I would like to mention my observations
regarding the
actual use of metres in classical Sanskrit literature.
There are two comprehensive collections and statistics of
metres
occurring in Sanskrit literature: one by K?hnau (based on
Stenzler's
collections), one by H. D. Velankar. For the bibliographical
details see
my paper A030 on www.academia.edu. From these papers we can
see that not
many more than 100 metres do actually occur in serious
Sanskrit texts
(the higher figure is some 130 metres). These 100 metres can
roughly
be divided into two halves of 50 each with 50 of them being
used very,
very rarely. The remaining 50 metres can again be split into
two halves
of 25 comparatively rare metres and 25 frequently used
metres which
every student of Sanskrit literature should know. They are
the content
of page 6 of my "Brief introduction ..."
These figures contrast highly with what theory teaches. The
most
comprehensive index of Sanskrit and Prakrit metres that can
be found in
H. D. Velankar's (a really great scholar and metrician)
wonderful
edition of Hemacandra's Chandonusasana lists about 1,000
different
meters. However, it is absolutely useless and superfluous to
study all
of them if only one tenth of them does actually occur. It
does not mean
anything if a would-be poet takes one of the additional
metres from a
chandahsastra and uses it only to show his erudition, if
nobody else
knows his particular metre. As Ashwini Deo has convincingly
shown in her
ground-breaking paper on Sanskrit metrics, it is very
unlikely for any
literature to actively use such a great variety of metres.
Even the 100
(130) metres listed by K?hnau and Velankar are not really
different
metres, but can be reduced to a much smaller number of basic
pattens and
their variations, as are Indravajra, Upendravajra and
Upajati, Vamsastha,
Indravamsa ind Vamsamala, Salini and Vaisvadevi, the four
Vaitaliya and
Aupacchandasaka off-shoots etc. etc. By the way, in the
1,130 stanzas of
his Kapphinabhyudaya the poet Sivasvamin uses 43 different
metres, which
is the highest number of metres in a classical work (from
the first
millenium) I know of. Practically all of them belong to my
"50 not
extremely rare metres" category; see my edition, Delhi 2013.
The
Buddhist authors Aryasura, Haribhatta, Gopadatta use not
more than 30
metres in their campu poems. The 150 metres in
Jnanasrimitras
Vrttamalastuti do not mean anything because they only serve
as
illustrations of theory.
In sharp contrast with the predilections of the Indian
metricians for
the increase of the number of metres and the invention of
ever new
varieties stands their neglect of, or silence about, some of
the basic
laws.of Indian metrics that every body knew and followed but
nobody
ever included in the sastras. Pingala teaches four varieties
of vipulas
for the sloka (anustubh, vaktra) metre: bhrau ntau, i.e. bh,
ra, na, and
ta vipula. This might habe been valid for his time. Until
the 11th
century CE no one seems to have noticed that the ta vipula
is virtually
non-existing in classical Sanskrit literature whereas
another vipula,
the ma-vipula, is actually the most specific and most
frequently used
among them. Ratnakarasanti is the first to reluctantly
acknowledge it:
d.r.s.taa makaare.naapy eva.m
Moreover, Indian metricians confined themselves only to the
description
of the syllables 5, 6, and 7 of the quarter, remaining
tacits about the
generally fixed structure of the preceding ga.na. It was
left to Western
scholars on the 19th century to formulate thosee laws that
the Indian
poets intuitively knew and followed already 2000 years
earlier.
The point of my remarks is that the metrical theory as
represented by
the chandahsastras is one thing and the actual practice of
the poets
something quite different. I would like to encourage a
deeper research
on the practical side (as done in an exmplary manner by
Ashwini Deo, on
a high theoretical analytical level) and to devote more
energy to the as
yet only unsufficiently explored question, what the
different metres
meant for Indian poets, what they regarded as their specific
functions.
Ksemendra in his Suvrttatilaka is by far too superficial. I
have written
about this topic but unfortunately mostly in German.
Michael Hahn
---
Prof. Dr. Michael Hahn
Ritterstr. 14
D-35287 Amoeneburg
Tel. +49-6422-938963
Fax: +49-6422-938967
E-mail: hahn.m@t-online.de
URL: staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~hahnm
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2014 17:28:16 +0100
From: Artur Karp <karp@uw.edu.pl>
To: Indology <indology@list.indology.info>
Subject: [INDOLOGY] Dhauli Elephant
Message-ID:
<CAEgrCzAvt3_wH2KNB=uH5L=JBK=4DvQdAC-QM3Sa29AQz+HKbA@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Sorry for X-posting ---
Dear List,
Does someone know the source of this pen ink drawing?
http://www.safarmer.com/Dhauli.elephant.jpg
Thanks in advance,
Artur Karp
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