Curing with Karma and Confession: Medieval Chinese Buddhist Healing Liturgies from Dunhuang (seminar)

Prof Stephen F. Teiser (Princeton University)

Abstract

The unrivalled corpus of medieval manuscripts unearthed in the northwestern Chinese desert town of Dunhuang in the early twentieth century divulged a trove of secrets about the practice of Chinese Buddhism. Among the thousands of liturgical texts created by local monks for the performance of rituals, almost two hundred separate manuscripts contain liturgies that were spoken aloud during healing rituals. This seminar introduces this body of material, provides an overview of the language, literary style, and sequencing of the liturgies, and leads the seminar through a close reading and translation of several texts in the original Chinese. 

Bio

Stephen F. Teiser is D.T. Suzuki Professor in Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion and Director of the interdepartmental Program in East Asian Studies at Princeton University. He is interested in the intersections between Buddhism and Chinese social life. He studies canonical texts, handwritten manuscripts, images, and temple complexes across the Buddhist world. His recent books include Reinventing the Wheel: Paintings of Rebirth in Medieval Buddhist Temples (University of Washington Press, 2006), which was awarded the Prix Stanislas Julien by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, Institut de France, and a volume co-edited with Morten Schlütter, Readings of the Platform Sūtra (Columbia University Press, 2012). His Yili yu fojiao yanjiu 儀禮與佛教研究 (Ritual and the Study of Buddhism) is forthcoming from Sanlian chubanshe (2019).