Dear Friends,

With all apologies for crossposting, but this should be of interest to some folk on the list. Below please find information on the third lecture in the Ghent Center for Buddhist Studies Spring Lecture Series (Permanent Training in Buddhist Studies (PTBS)) generously sponsored by the Tianzhu Foundation. Matthew D. Milligan Trinity University (San Antonio, TX) will give a lecture on March 30, 2021 at 19.00 Belgian time. All lectures in this series will be held remotely over Zoom. Interested parties are welcome to attend the series or individual talks. To get the Zoom link, please register by writing to CBS@ugent.be by the morning of March 30. The link will be sent out the day of the talk.

With my kind regards,

Charles DiSimone

Economic Class in Early South Asian Buddhism: Perspectives from Epigraphy and the Divyāvadāna

Matthew D. Milligan
 Trinity University (San Antonio, TX)

To date, most studies of classical South Asian Buddhist demographics have focused on varṇa and conversion, mercantile professions, and, more recently, finally, on gender. Unfortunately, even when scholars have turned their gaze onto demographics they have primarily relied upon anachronistic and generalized readings of literature and/or century old tabulations of inscriptions. As far as I can tell, there have been no attempts to critically examine economic class through close readings of texts and historical documents together. In this paper, I will evaluate the definition of “economic class,” decouple it from classical Sanskrit concepts of idealized varṇa, and introduce some new data from texts and inscriptions to examine the lived realities of “class" from approximately 300 BCE until at least the 5th c. CE when the Divyāvadāna was composed.

Bio

Matthew D. Milligan is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. He is also a Harwood Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He works on the intersections of Buddhism, Economics, and Philology and has published numerous articles on the economic history of Buddhism in South Asia. In addition to forthcoming articles in the Journal of Contemporary Religion and South Asian Studies, he is completing a book manuscript titled Of Rags and Riches: The Disruptive Business of Early Buddhism. His latest project involves decolonizing the field of engaged Buddhist Economics in the United States.