Padmanabh S. Jaini, Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley
| DATE: | Thursday, September 27, 2007 |
|---|---|
| TIME: | 5:00 PM |
| PLACE: | IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor |
| FORMAT: | Lecture |
| SPONSORS: | Center for Buddhist Studies |
A special lecture to celebrate the establishment of the Padmanabh S. Jaini Graduate Student Award in Buddhist Studies
Responses by UCLA Professors Gregory Schopen and Robert Buswell
The "Buddhist" Nationalism of Ceylon (late 19th and early 20th century) had its roots in the Saṅgha-led agitation against the five hundred years of missionary activities during the successive Christian rule of that island by the Portuguese (1505-1638), the Dutch (1638-1795), and the British (1814-1947).
In the wake of independence that "religious" nationalism became transformed into an "ethnic" nationalism, claiming primacy for Buddhist education as well as for the Sinhalese over Tamil (the language of the minority), thus sowing the seeds of a bloody separatist movement. This was partly inspired by the widely read accounts of the victory of the Buddhist Sinhala hero Duṭṭhagāmaṇi Abhaya (101-77 B.C.E.) over the Damiḷa (Tamil) ruler Eḷāra (145-101 B.C.E.) in a bloody war, after which the king grieved over the dead, feared for his own rebirth in heaven, but was assured of his "innocence" by a group of arahants.
All this is detailed in the epic Mahāvaṃsa, hailed as a Buddhist Chronicle by its editor and translator W. Geiger (1908). Much has been written about the ensuing Sri Lankan political developments in the papers edited by Smith Bardwell in his Religion and Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka (1978) and by G. Obeysekere in his "Duṭṭhagāmaṇī and the Buddhist Conscience" (1992).
Professor Jaini will examine the doctrinal implications of the grounds for "absolution" granted by the arahants in an act of warfare by a Buddhist king, apparently for the glory of the Dhamma.
Padmanabh S. Jaini is Professor emeritus of Buddhist Studies and co-founder of the Group in Buddhist Studies. Before joining UC Berkeley in 1972, he taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of numerous monographs and articles on both Buddhism and Jainism. In the field of Buddhist Studies he is particularly well known for his work on Abhidharma and for his critical editions of the Abhidharmadīpa (a Vaibhāṣika treatise), the Sāratamā (a commentary on the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā), and a collection of apocryphal Jātakas, the Paññāsa-Jātaka, that appeared in four volumes (text and translation). His collected essays have appeared in two volumes, and, recently, he has been honored by a Festschrift (2003) with contributions on early Buddhism and Jainism.
