Veranstaltungen
Sacred Substances: How to Construct, Consecrate, and Collect Buddhist Images in Early 20th Century Darjeeling
A lecture by Berthe Jansen (Assistant Professor at Leiden University)
Date and time: January 29, 2025, 6:15 pm
Venue: University of Hamburg, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, Hauptgebäude (Main Building), Hörsaal M
This presentation has as its starting point a number of works written by Phun tshogs lung rtogs (d. 1926), a non-elite Tibetan scribe who left Tibet to live in India. These articles were written in Tibetan at the request of his employer and student Johan Van Manen (1877-1943), but were never published and are now preserved as part of the Van Manen Collection in Leiden University. These materials, which have yet to receive scholarly attention, provide insight into the processes of making earthen statues, their consecration, restoration, and the handling of other sacred objects. One of Van Manen’s final publications entitled On Making Earthen Images: Repairing Old Images and Drawing Scroll-Pictures in Tibet (1933) consists of a translation of one of these texts. He explains that his interest in the topic began during his temporary position at the Anthropological and Ethnographic Galleries of the Indian Museum in Calcutta in 1922. While reorganizing the museum’s Tibetan collection, he realized he lacked systematic information about the creation of images in all their forms—whether painted, carved, or cast. He therefore asked his Tibetan teacher to gather information on the subject and prepare a “short memorandum” (p. 105), which became the foundation for the 1933 article. Closer examination of the other archived materials shows that this is not entirely accurate, however. This talk explores these Tibetan archival materials and the collaborative study between Phun tshogs lung rtogs and Van Manen, highlighting the significance of this research in the broader context of Van Manen’s efforts to collect Himalayan artifacts. This example of engaging with different aspects of the Van Manen Collection helps to demonstrate how a broader study of a collection of texts, artefacts, and (local) contexts can contribute to our understanding—in this case, an understanding of consecration and collecting methods of Buddhist images, as well as of co-operative scholarship related to image-making in the early 20th century in Asia.
Berthe Jansen is Assistant Professor of Tibetan Studies at Leiden University. She is a scholar of Buddhist Studies, specializing in Tibetan social and religious history. She lived in India for five years and graduated from the Lotsawa Rinchen Zangpo Translator Programme in Dharmashala in 2005. Thereafter she obtained a BA in Indology at Leiden, an MPhil in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at Oxford, and a PhD degree in Buddhist Studies back in Leiden. Jansen had a Dutch government grant (NWO) to research the relationship between Buddhism and law in pre-modern Tibet (2016-2022). She is currently the PI of the ERC-funded project: Locating Literature, Lived Religion, and Lives in the Himalayas: The Van Manen Collection (2023-2028). Her monograph The Monastery Rules: Tibetan Monastic Organization in Pre-modern Tibet was published in 2018 by University of California Press. In 2023, her first Buddhism-inspired children’s book Don’t kill the bugs came out with Bala Publications. She has worked as an interpreter and translator of Buddhist Tibetan since 2004.
Biographies of Chinese Buddhists in Past and Present
Interdisciplinary Workshop, 14–15 February 2025
Room 123, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, East Wing (ESA O 123)
Since the time that Buddhist believers and practitioners began travelling and preaching in China, the stories of important proponents of the faith have been recounted and recorded. Bearing this in mind, the varieties of biographical material about Buddhists has been extracted from all sorts of sources and analyzed by many scholars, past and present. Although scholarship has traditionally been limited to the close reading of extant pre-modern historical sources, new research methods—particularly from the field of the Digital Humanities—have allowed us to gain new insights into the past and its people. At the same time, the study of modern and contemporary Buddhist religious life has greatly developed in the last decade, adopting different philological and ethnographic methods to study the modern genesis of a new Buddhism in China’s political and social culture. While the sources and methods adopted in the study of pre-modern and modern Buddhism differ in many respects, there is much to be gained from a discussion between scholars of these two subfields of Chinese Buddhist studies.
This workshop will be a roundtable discussion promoting the exchange of research experiences as well as the development of ideas on various aspects of biographical studies. This discussion will be between senior and junior scholars of pre-modern and modern Chinese Buddhism, as well as leading experts in the Digital Humanities. Topics of discussion will range from the connections between hagiographies, (auto-)biographies, and historiographical sources, to the significance of social networks and geographical mapping in the creation of databases and other Digital Humanities tools.
The workshop will consist of an introductory session featuring four keynote speeches, followed by three sessions, each focusing on a specific discussion topic. Participants are asked to contribute to each session with a statement of up to ten minutes, sharing their insights on the topic at hand, which will then be followed by an open discussion
A flyer of the workshop with the full program can be viewed and downloaded here.
Convenors: Leo Maximilian Koenig and Dr. Carsten Krause