I am pleased to invite interested parties to the following talk by Nicholas Witkowski (University of San Diego) organized by the Gandhāra Corpora Project, South Asia Research Network Ghent, and Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies held in person and online at Ghent University. The talk will also be streamed online and if you would like to participate in that way please write me via email for the MS Teams link.

Title:
Monastic Monsters: Historicizing Outcaste Characters in the Grotesquerie of Indian Buddhist Literature

Date and Time: October 3, 2024, at 16:00
Location: Faculteitszaal, Blandijn
faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte
Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent

Abstract:
This presentation forms one pillar of a broader project to write the history of outcaste Buddhism drawing upon texts from the Buddhist legal codes (Vinaya). There is an assumption, implicit in much of early Buddhist material, as well as in much of modern scholarship, that Buddhism is primarily an upper-caste affair. In other words, the field effectively operates as though outcaste Buddhist communities lacked the agential capacity to shape the institutional and soteriological landscape of South Asian Buddhism. Articulating the contours of outcaste influence, or even presence, can prove difficult, as many cases in the Vinaya tend to mask caste status. In this presentation, I will focus on a particular Vinaya case about a monastic monster—a sexually deviant figure—in order to propose a methodological approach to reading for outcaste monastics. As postcolonial studies of colonial literature have argued, the discourse of sexual deviancy is often code for subaltern fugitivity—in this case, fugitivity from the socio-economic fetters of caste. This presentation will argue that we may read cases of sexual deviancy among monks in the Vinaya as a discursive index of upper-caste anxiety about the presence of outcaste communities in the monastery.

About the Speaker:
Nicholas Witkowski is Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of San Diego. His current project, Lifestyles of Impurity, is a study of low-/outcaste monastic communities in first millennium South Asia that employs the theoretical armature of historians of the everyday. This book project integrates feminist, Marxist, post-colonialist, and Foucauldian literary-critical approaches to the study of textual sources documenting the socio-religious practices of low-/outcaste communities. What Dr. Witkowski hopes to convey is a nuanced articulation of the social locations of marginality as wellsprings of cultural innovation that continued to resist, challenge, and, in certain key respects, transform Brahmanical imperial discourse and practice across the Sanskrit cosmopolis throughout the first millennium CE.