Skip to main content
Skip to main menu Skip to spotlight region Skip to secondary region Skip to UGA region Skip to Tertiary region Skip to Quaternary region Skip to unit footer

Slideshow

Center for Asian Studies to Host Professor Ronald Davidson | October 28

Image:
poster

Dr. Ronald M. Davidson was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, culminating in his PhD in Buddhist Studies. Separately, he studied with Tibetans for more than a decade and a half, working with several scholars on Tibetan texts and studying both ritual and doctrine in a traditional manner. His primary teacher was Ngor Thartse Khenpo (Hiroshi Sonami) representing the Sakya Order of Tibetan Buddhism, but he also studied the Nyingma Order with Gyatrul Domang Rinpoche and several others. He lived for two and a half years in a Buddhist center in Berkeley, CA studying ritual. His teaching focuses on the social and intellectual aspects of Buddhism in Asia, and extending out to survey courses on Asian Religions. His research is primarily on Mahayana Buddhist ritual, and its crossover into early tantrism in India, from the fifth to the ninth century.

Davidson will be visiting the University of Georgia to present the talk Esoteric Buddhism in the Matrix of Early Medieval India: An Overview.

Esoteric Buddhism emerged between the fall of the Gupta-Vākāṭaka hegemony (ca 550 CE) up to the rise of the three great powers (Pāla, Rāṣṭṛakūṭa, Pratīhāra) in the mid eighth century, becoming Indian Buddhism’s richest ritual expression. Scholars of Śaivism have somewhat prematurely dubbed the entire early medieval period (ca 550-1200 CE) the ‘Śaiva Age,’ but that designation is predominantly true with respect to royal affiliation, less so for the culture at large as may be seen in the donative inscriptions and popular literature, which do not reflect Śaiva cultural dominance in the manner portrayed. Similarly, the depiction of later Buddhism as ‘brahmanized’ has inaccurately represented the selective uptake and modification of brahmanical rituals or the sociology of Buddhist engagement. Rather, this was the age of internecine warfare at the local and regional levels, with a dramatic erosion of social controls. The belligerence of the period precipitated the decline of national trading cooperatives, the rise of regional networks, and the emergence of marginalized groups and ritual systems. Within this era, Buddhist authors and institutions operated with bewilderingly complex resources—intellectual, ritual, artistic, social, linguistic, etc.—that revealed a spectrum of engagements, from accommodation to resistance and everything in between.

Esoteric Buddhist myths and rituals reflect to some extent these developments, so that the bodhisattva as sārthavāha (caravan master) becomes replaced by the bodhisattva as vidyādhara (sorcerer), signaling the change in models of agency from the mercantile to the magical. The earliest corpora of literature—that of the Amoghapāśa on one hand and the Uṣṇīṣa texts on the other—were constructed on the earlier dhāraṇī texts of the fifth and sixth centuries, as seen in the Chinese translations from the Liáng Dynasty to the Táng. Yet both the Uṣṇīṣa and Amoghapāśa materials reveal further ritual directions that will be more robustly expressed in the eighth and ninth centuries, with the development of the Vajroṣṇīṣa canon and the Yoganiruttara and Yoginī tantras. These included aspects of Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism, to be sure, but also rituals from local spirit cults, lineages of magicians, gṛhya rituals from domestic brahmanical priests, material from the solar cult, to name but the most significant sources.

For esoteric Buddhism, the most important early region was that of the Vārāṇasī-Pātaliputra-Gāyā triangle, with its multiplicity of Buddhist sites and intermittent institutional support. Other centers, however, quickly arose—each with its own rituals and lore—and by the end of the eighth century most of North India had developed independent centers of esoteric practice, spreading thence to Śrī Laṅka and Śrīvijaya, as well as to Tibet, Nepal and East Asia. The speed and urgency of esoteric missionary activity in South and Southeast Asia are markers of a new dynamic.

Co-Sponsered by the UGA Center for Asian Studies, Lamar Dodd School of Art, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

Read More:

Support us

We appreciate your financial support. Your gift is important to us and helps support critical opportunities for students and faculty alike, including lectures, travel support, and any number of educational events that augment the classroom experience. Click here to learn more about giving.

Every dollar given has a direct impact upon our students and faculty.