Events

Past Events

The Chinese Medieval Studies Workshop is now at Rutgers University. The 8th Annual Meeting will be held on May 5, 2012. This workshop, started by Professor Wendy Swartz and funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo (CCK) Foundation, is a major academic forum for the exchange of ideas and the advancement of scholarship. Distinguished scholars from across the United States working on medieval Chinese literature, history, religion, and visual culture, have been meeting annually in this forum since 2003 to discuss their current research. Ground-breaking research and methodology first presented at these workshops have found their way into notable books and journal articles.

Date: Saturday, May 5, 2012

Place: Murray Hall, Room 302

Time: 9:30-5:30

Please click here for the event schedule

Participants: Sarah Allen (Wellesley College), Robert Ashmore (University of California, Berkeley), Robert Campany (Vanderbilt University), Jack Chen (University of California, Los Angeles), Alexei Ditter (Reed College), Goh Meow-Hui (Ohio State University), Christopher Nugent (Williams College), Wendy Swartz (Rutgers University), Wang Ping (Princeton University)

Riding a Guilt Trip to Heaven: Buddhist Childbed Practices and Women’s Salvation in Medieval China

Jessey J.C. Choo, University of Missouri-Kansas City

Tuesday, February 14, 4:30 P.M.

Scott Hall, Room 332

Abstract: Few women in medieval China went to childbed secure in the knowledge they would survive. They could, however, be assured of their salvation especially if they died in childbirth with the help of some interesting Buddhist liturgies. According to various accounts of the life of the Buddha, Queen Māyā, the birth mother of the historical Buddha, died only seven days after giving birth to the great savior. Her pregnancy was smooth and comfortable, and she suffered from no discomfort while gaining great religious insights. All this contrasts sharply with her demise after the childbirth. Given the medieval Chinese view that any child who had caused the death of its mother was inauspicious and unfilial—some children were not even raised for this reason alone—monastic scholars were hard-pressed to explain why Queen Māyā died if all signs suggested that her son was the embodiment of the wonderful Buddhist teachings. Doctrinal wriggles aside, liturgical texts show that many found this embarrassing episode in the Buddha’s life is ripe with salvific potential. The Buddha was said in several sūtras to have met with his dead mother twice. On the first occasion, he went to the Trāyastriṃśa Heaven and preached the Dharma to Queen Māyā, who achieved ultimate salvation as a result. Then, after supposedly passing into nirvana at the time of his death, he rose from his coffin to salute his mother when the latter descended from heaven to lament his passing. Both meetings—the second one appearing only in Chinese apocrypha—affirmed the Buddha’s guilt and therefore Queen Māyā’s inevitable salvation. By pairing the transaction between the Buddha and his birth mother with that of any child and mother, Buddhist liturgies provided expectant mothers the guarantee of enlightenment even in the event of death. This paper examines the context in which liturgies with this particular salvific strategy evolved. It also analyzes how this strategy squared with that used in other contemporaneous but better known Buddhist and Daoist liturgies that rescued women only after they had been condemned to hell for their role in the childbirth.

The Birth of the “Spectator”: Spatial Transformations of Song-Yuan and Ming-Qing Theater

Ling Hon Lam, Vanderbilt University

Tuesday, February 7, 4:30 P.M.

Scott Hall, Room 332

Abstract: Counterpoised against the nineteenth-century Western proscenium theater, traditional Chinese theater has been characterized as a noisy, distractive, and socially multifunctional space. The vocal presence of the audience, we are told, shatters the fourth wall with bravos, boos, and chitchats. From this perspective, archaeologists envisage a continual development from the earliest temple theaters to late Qing teahouses, all allegedly embodying progressively the “subjectivity” of the audience. Refuting such teleological accounts of Chinese theater, Professor Lam’s talk distinguishes two different spatial logics underlying performance and theater architectures before and after the turn of the seventeenth century. In this light, Professor Lam reconceptualizes Song-Yuan to Mid-Ming theater in terms of the “dreamscape,” with the “dreamer” instead of the “spectator” as the ontological category. Tracing the transformation of performance venues as envisioned and embodied in the fourteenth- to seventeenth-century drama and temple theater, he argues that the “spectator” should be historicized as a latecomer when theatricality emerged from the relics of the dreamscape from the late Ming on.

Communication and Cooperation in Early Imperial China

Charles Sanft, University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study

Tuesday, January 31, 4:30 P.M.

Scott Hall, Room 332

Abstract: In this talk, Professor Sanft employs interdisciplinary theory to suggest that cooperation played a large role in Qin governance, and that state-wide communication was the most important means for organizing that. Using evidence from both transmitted historical sources and recently excavated materials of various sorts, he offers an interpretation that challenges common understandings and presents a way to take often undervalued ideas about government seriously. The picture that emerges from this analysis suggests that the Qin dynasty and the First Emperor succeeded not because of authoritarianism, but because of innovative communication that integrated the realm into a functioning whole.