Workshop: Reconsidering the Historiography of the Madhyamaka School

1. Dezember 2022

The Madhyamaka school, along with the Yogācāra, is one of the two principal schools of Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism, which was founded by Nāgārjuna (ca. 150–250 CE). The tenet of this school that “all things are svabhāvaśūnya (devoid of intrinsic nature)” has great influence on Buddhism both inside and outside of India, specifically, East Asia and Tibet. Due to lack of Indian sources, modern scholars have constructed the history of the school, mainly based on Tibetan transmission. However, since 2000, new manuscripts of Mādhyamikas’ basic texts were discovered; the increase in the number of the texts accessible to original Sanskrit has changed significantly the circumstances of Madhyamaka studies. It is therefore time to reconsider and reconstruct the history of the Madhyamaka School. The conference was a kickoff-workshop for investigating the issues. Together with leading researchers in this field, the first conference discussed with methodologies in which the history of the school is restored, and its periodization is made.

A flyer can be found here. A timetable is found here. 

Participants 

Keynote Speech: 
Leonard van der Kuijp (Harvard University)

Participants:
Anne MacDonald (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Ryo Nishiyama (Kyoto University)
Hiromichi Sasaki (Kyoto University)
Masaki Tamura (National Institute of Technology, Kagawa College)
Zhouyang Ma (Harvard University)
Theresa Bachhuber (Hamburg University)
Venerable Hejung (Hamburg University)
Ryan Conlon (Hamburg University)
Arihiro Kosaka (Hamburg University)