Buddhist Spiritual Care in Interreligious Contexts (A Lecture by Rev. Dr. Monica Sanford, Harvard Divinity School)

Wednesday, 17 June 2026, 18:00-20:00
Free Admission from 17:45 on

University of Hamburg
Erwin-Panofsky-Room / ESA C
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1 · 20146 Hamburg

Please register by 15 June at AWR@uni-hamburg.de for participation in the room or online. The online link will be sent to you after registration.

Visionary Reflections of Text, History, and Philosophy

—The Saddharmasmṛtyupasthāna Manuscript (WORKSHOP)

"Visionary Reflections of Text, History, and Philosophy--The Saddharmasmṛtyupasthāna Manuscript" brings together a group of international scholars to explore the various ways one specific text--the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthāna--has been read, received, and might be interpreted across cultures in a variety of textual, philosophical and performative modes. The event involves a one-day symposium with presentations on the state of the manuscript and the text's historical reception, and a two-day Sanskrit reading workshop for students and researchers with a focus on the section of the text devoted to the "Sudharma Assembly." The workshop is supported by the generosity of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Situating Children in the Medieval Chinese Karmic Landscape (A Lecture by Kelly M. Carlton, Columbia University)

Donnerstag, 30.04.2026, 18 Uhr. Asien-Afrika-Institut, Raum 123, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1 – Flügel Ost.

In Buddhism, karma is generally understood as a disinterested force that applies uniformly to all sentient beings. While karmic fruitions vary depending on the intention and conditions under which an action is performed, karma does not operate differently on the basis of any particular path of rebirth or stage of life. This understanding of karma, however, creates tension within a medieval Chinese sociocultural framework in which children were believed to lack full moral capacities until a certain age. How did medieval Chinese Buddhists reconcile karmic causality with age-dependent moral awareness, and how might shifting attention to the child illuminate points of negotiation and innovation in medieval Chinese Buddhist thought?

This talk examines these questions through the lens of medieval Chinese Buddhist miracle tales from the fourth to tenth centuries. Reflecting wider assumptions about young children’s physiomental development, surviving collections of miracle tales evince an age-dependent notion of moral capacity: children younger than roughly seven or eight years of age, who have yet to acquire moral discernment, do not bear the consequences of their negative karma. This agedependent model, however, was only one thread in an expanding web of ideas concerning personal and collective karma in medieval China, held in tension with notions of children’s filial indebtedness and their susceptibility to inherited karmic burdens. By centering the overlooked figure of the child in Buddhist discourses, this talk shows how karmic principles are culturally defined rather than universal, and in the case of medieval China, followed sociocultural assumptions about physio-mental development and familial obligation.

Thomas Fröhlich, Julia Schneider, Kai Vogelsang

Hamburger Sinologische Gesellschaft e.V.
Abteilung für Sprache und Kultur Chinas
Asien-Afrika-Institut, Universität Hamburg

Early Buddhism and the Origins of the Mahāyāna

A Lecture by Dr. Alex Wynne, Senior Academic Consultant at the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies

December 17, 2025, 4:15 pm,  Asia-Africa-Institute, East Wing  (ESA O 120) and online, for online participation please register via eventbrite

This lecture will present a new thesis on the origin of Mahāyāna Buddhism, based on a reassessment of early Buddhist teaching. It will claim that the old paradigm, of the emergence of the ‘Perfection of Wisdom’ (prajñāpāramitā) from Abhidharma thought, is not supported by the textual evidence. Instead, it will be argued that the true background to the Prajñāpāramitā, and to early Mahāyāna in general, is to be located in two early Buddhist trends: first, apophatic or ‘no view’ teachings, strongly stated in the Pāli Aṭṭhakavagga (‘Book of Eights’) and related texts; and second, mythic ‘Bodhisatta’-style teachings which articulate the idea of a long and irreversible path to enlightenment over numerous lifetimes. The early tension and interaction between these two forms of spirituality explains the earliest sections of the oldest Mahāyāna text: the Aṣṭasāhasrikā or ‘short’ Prajñāpāramitā.

Alexander Wynne is a Chief Editor at the Dhammachai Tipiṭaka Project, Thailand, which is preparing a critical of the Pāli canon, and Senior Academic Consultant at the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. He received a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2004, and has published extensively on early Buddhist thought and practice.

Buddhist responses to the 2021 military coup in Myanmar

A Lecture by Prof. Dr. Iselin Frydenlund, MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society

December 03, 2025, 4:15 pm, ESA Ost, Room 120 and online - for online participation please register via eventbrite

The military coup in Myanmar on 1 February 2021 ended a period of semi-civilian rule (2011–2021), bringing the country once again under direct military rule. Recent research into the religious responses to the coup in its early phases indicates that the mass protests were characterised by global internet culture, inter-religious solidarity, and new visions for a plural and democratic Myanmar. The Buddhist Sangha, it is often claimed, remained silent and was mainly supportive of the military. In this talk I argue that this narrative is too simplistic, ignoring both changes in attitudes over time, as well as internal divisions within the Sangha. Rather, what we see is both monastic justification of the military's action and resistance to it. Moreover, I will also make the case that Buddhist support for the coup must be understood not only within an instrumentalist framework or within what we can refer to as the "Military-monastic complex", but also through a specific "Buddhist Ideology of Order." In opposition to this, a Buddhist revolutionary movement is identified. It envisions radical societal transformations, including of institutional Buddhism itself. Finally, I will discuss the ways in which pro-revolutionary activities go well beyond established monastic revolutionary networks, indicating broader Sangha engagement in the Myanmar Spring Revolution than has often been assumed.

Dr. Iselin Frydenlund is professor of the Study of Religions at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society and a Fellow of the MF Centre for the Advanced Study of Religion (MF CASR). She specializes in questions relating to Buddhism and its societal impact, focusing on Buddhism, politics, nationalism and violence in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. She also works on Buddhist-Muslim relations in Buddhist majority states in Asia and was the PI of the Research Council of Norway-funded research project INTERSECT (“Intersecting Flows of Islamophobia”). Since 2016 she has also been heading an academic exchange program between MF and Myanmar Institute of Theology. Frydenlund regularly appears in national and international media on questions related to Buddhism and politics, and she frequently provides analysis for policy-makers home and abroad. Her latest book is Buddhist-Muslim Relations in a Theravada World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), co-edited with Michael Jerryson. Her monograph on Buddhism as a political force in Asia will soon appear for the Scandinavian University Press.

The Dharma of Giving and the Giving of the Dharma: Social and Soteriological Implications of Teachings on Dāna from a Buddhist Heaven

A Lecture by Prof. Dr. Daniel Stuart, University of South Carolina

November 19, 2025, 4:14 pm,  Asia-Africa-Institute, East Wing  (ESA O 120) and online, for online participation please register via eventbrite

This talk explores a narrative episode in a middle period Buddhist sūtra, the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra to explore implications of teachings on giving (dāna). The narrative presents readers with the motif of the karma mirror, utilized in this instance by the king of the Heaven of the Thirty-three Gods, Śakra/Indra, to teach the inhabitants of his realm about low, middling, and high forms of giving and their karmic effects. By elucidating how these teachings are articulated in the text, this talk shows how internal Buddhist debates on giving involved tensions between different kinds of Dharma teachers and around the goals of Dharma teaching at social and soteriological levels of concern.

Daniel M. Stuart is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina. He holds an MA in Sanskrit Literature and a PhD in Buddhist Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. His research examines the history and transformation of Buddhist contemplative practices from premodern South Asia to the global present. He is the author of Thinking about Cessation (2013), A Less Traveled Path (2015), The Stream of Deathless Nectar (2017), S. N. Goenka: Emissary of Insight (2020), and Insight in Perspective (2024). Daniel M. Stuart is currently a fellow of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Stiftung at Hamburg University.