Smith College Buddhist Studies

07/01/2025

Videos of "Taking Buddhist Philosophy Seriously: A Symposium in Honor of Jay L. Garfield” are now available through the Smith College Buddhist Studies YouTube channel. Eight of Jay's former students presented, and many more participated in the lively conversations. LInks below and in the comments. Smith College South Asian Studies

Christian Coseru “Can Dialetheism Save Nagarjuna’s Vexed Philosophical Reputation?” Laura Guerrero, “A Defense of Buddhist Realism”(March 29, 2025)

03/18/2025

In honor of Jay Garfield’s upcoming retirement, we have arranged an all-day symposium featuring his former students on Saturday, March 29. Please mark your calendars and spread the word!

04/05/2023

Nick Witkowski's lecture is now available on our YouTube channel:

03/24/2023

This Monday, March 27 at 5 pm in Seelye 201, another lecture!

Jessica Starling (Lewis & Clark College) will speak on "Making Modern Buddhist Women: Jōdo Shinshū’s Modern Fujin Kyōka Discourse".

By late in the Meiji period (1868-1912), Buddhist lay women's groups, like other kinds of women’s associations, were flourishing all over Japan. The two major True Pure Land Buddhist sects, the Honganji-ha and Ōtani-ha, produced a wealth of religious educational materials aimed specifically at women, a genre of propagation known as fujin kyōka. However, these tracts contained overwhelmingly negative messages about the spiritual status of women, with doctrinal content mostly taken verbatim from the sermons of medieval and early modern teachers. This talk examines the dynamics of Buddhist doctrinal production during a period of increasingly visible roles for women in Japanese society, uncovering the story of what it meant to be a “modern Buddhist women” in Japan at the turn of the 20th century.

Jessica Starling received her PhD from the University of Virginia in 2012, and is currently Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Lewis & Clark College. Starling’s research is on Buddhism as lived in contemporary Japan, with a focus on the Jōdo Shinshū and special attention to themes such as gender, family, ethics, emotion and illness. A recently published article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion called “Audience, Authorship, and Agency: Religious Educational Materials for Modern Buddhist Women’s Groups in Japan,” is about Buddhist lay women's groups in late Meiji (1868-1912) Japan. Her analysis highlights the dynamics of the production of doctrinal materials by male monks in response to the voracious demand of these well-educated and well-organized women’s groups, and suggests that in the absence of female-authored texts, audienceship and readership might be considered as important agentive actions by women religious. A second, ongoing research project engages ethnographic fieldwork to understand contemporary Buddhist responses to stigma and discrimination. Starling profiles Shin Buddhist volunteers who have taken up the cause of leprosy (also known as Hansen’s Disease) awareness and advocacy, working both inside and outside of Buddhist institutions to redress the past and current suffering of Hansen’s Disease patients.

Sponsored by the Smith College Buddhist Studies Program, Religion Department and Lecture Committee. Open to the public.

03/16/2023

Next week, Nick Witkowski joins us for his lecture "The Challenges of Returning Buddhist Women Monastics to Historical Visibility" -- Wednesday, March 22 at 5 pm in Seelye 201.

This talk will focus on two challenges faced by the reader/translator of representations of female monastics who appear in the narratives of the Buddhist monastic law codes, or Vinaya. The first challenge will be to consider how best to bring Western, or “liberal,” feminist theory into dialogue with South Asian female monastics who employ a discourse of agency that does not take for granted broad critiques of institutionalized gender hierarchy. The second task will be to determine how one might look for “religious feminisms” in the world of early medieval South Asian Buddhism, when many, if not all, of our extant textual sources seem to represent institutional (and profoundly patriarchal) impulses.

Nicholas Witkowski received his PhD in 2015 in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. His dissertation is a social history of subaltern ascetic practices in the Buddhist monastic institutions of first millennium South Asia. Before joining the University of San Diego in August of 2022 as Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies and South Asian religions, Dr. Witkowski was Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Nanyang Technological University of Singapore (2018-2022). Dr. Witkowski was also a JSPS Postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at Tokyo University (IAS), where he completed a two year project studying the representations of subaltern communities within South Asian legal traditions (2015–2017).

03/13/2023

We are very pleased that the excellent lecture delivered by Sonya Rhie Mace on March 2 is available for viewing.

Full title: "Sandalwood and Radiance: Tracing the Transmission of Early Buddha Images"In a lecture inspired by the life and scholarship of Marylin Martin Rhi...

03/13/2023

From Woodenfish and Venerable Yifa:

Humanistic Buddhist Monastic Life Program July 2023 in Taipei, Taiwan

A one-month monastic life and meditation program 2023 in Taipei, Taiwan. Based on our educational mission, this program is FREE for room and board, tuition of classes and cultural tours, even though each selected student will be charged $500 USD for supplies and admission fee, and be responsible for their own flight to and from Taiwan.

Woodenfish Foundation has been carrying out this program for twenty years and inspired many of attendees developing the interests in Mandarin and culture of Asia or Buddhism. We are glad to resume this long-waiting summer program in a friendly, supportive and culturally resourceful place Taiwan, after three years’ pandemic!

www.woodenfish.org/hbmlp

03/01/2023

Join us tomorrow at 5 pm for this lecture by Sonya Rhie Mace!

02/23/2023

Last week's lecture by Sonam Kachru is now available to watch on our YouTube channel:

A lecture by Sonam Kachru, Yale University give on February 15, 2023 at Smith College.

02/23/2023

Please join us next Thursday, March 2 at 5 pm in Seelye Hall 201 for a lecture inspired by the life and scholarship of Marylin Martin Rhie in which her daughter Sonya Rhie Mace will discuss the multi-sensorial aspects of the Buddha image as it moved from India to China in the first centuries of the common era. Drawing from both visual and textual sources, Rhie Mace will show how scent and light were potent signifiers of the Buddha’s presence, possibly of greater importance than the appearance of his physical form. With a focus on the material evidence from South Asia, Rhie Mace's lecture will reveal how artists conveyed the intangible qualities of enlightenment.

Sonya Rhie Mace (Smith class of ’93) is the George P. Bickford Curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art and adjunct professor of art history at Case Western Reserve University. She received her Ph.D. at Harvard University in the history of Indian and South Asian art in 1999, and the book based on her dissertation, History of Early Stone Sculpture at Mathura (c. 150 BCE – 100 CE) was published in 2007.

Sponsored by the Buddhist Studies Program, Art Department and Lecture Committee. Open to vaccinated members of the public.

02/14/2023

Tomorrow at 5 pm in Seelye 201, Sonam Kachru's lecture on "The Truth about Poetry: Some Buddhist Fictions". Join us!

This talk explores the nature and salience of poetry from the point of view of some Indian Buddhists, beginning with invocations of poetry as a natural phenomenon, found wherever humans exist, and invocations of poetry as a culturally specific achievement, sometimes expressive of, and sometimes in tension with, Buddhist normative ideals. But then we turn to stories in which the discovery of poetry counts as something of a world-historical event. We’ll listen as Rahul Sankrtyayan tells of the birth of Buddhist poetry in the civilizational contact of Greek and Indic cultures, and consider what Buddhists learnt about poetry—and art more generally—when one Buddhist succeeded in converting the devil.