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 (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