Imagining Buddhist History: Historical Consciousness in the Buddhist Traditions of South and East Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel explores the way in which Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Japan, and the Tibetan diaspora have imagined their respective positions within Buddhist history. The papers center on three themes: theories of decline, a given Buddhist tradition’s relationship with its imagined origins, and anxiety born of an awareness of history.
Friedrich looks at a twelfth-century Sinhala compendium’s portrayal of Buddhist decline and shows that this account was used to understand political and social degeneration in Buddhist terms. He also shows that while Sinhalese saw the decline of Buddhism as inevitable, they also believed that royal support of Buddhist institutions could slow the process, a belief that helped assuage their anxiety.
Focusing on separation from a Buddhist homeland, Mikles examines the use of the King Gesar myth by monastics in the Tibetan diaspora to establish a link between themselves and Tibet, and to understand their own position within a Tibetan history from which they are increasingly removed.
Similarly addressing anxiety around separation, Thompson looks at theories of decline in medieval Japan and at how Buddhists who grew increasingly concerned about their historical distance from the Buddha’s India came to terms with their predicament and developed theories to overcome or deny it.
Proffitt explores how a Japanese sect formulated its own history, creating for itself an imagined continuity from the eighth century to the present. He also looks at modern scholars’ uncritical acceptance of this narrative, thus showing how academic views of Buddhist history are often based on the tradition’s own account.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Luke N. Thompson, Columbia University

Chair

• Luke N. Thompson, Columbia University

Individual Presentations

• Buddhist History in a Time of Uncertainty: Discourses of Religious Decline from Late-Medieval Sri Lanka - Philip Friedrich, University of Pennsylvania

• Toward a Critical History of Mount Kōya: Sect, Founder, Place, and Practice - Aaron Proffitt, State University of New York, Albany

• The Dalai Lama as King Gesar, the Karmapa as his Warrior: Mythic History to Bind the Dis-Membered Body of Tibet - Natasha L. Mikles, American Academy of Religion

• Japanese Buddhist Conceptions of History as seen in Kakuken’s Sangoku dentōki - Luke N. Thompson, Columbia University

Discussant

• Mark Blum, University of California, Berkeley