Yehan Numata Program Lecture: "Where is the Mind in the Atom? Materializing the Moral Imagination in the Shadow of the Mind and Life Dialogues"
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Yehan Numata Program in Buddhist Studies 2024-25
What are the epistemic and institutional limits of brainhood as anthropological figure of modernity? When the Tibetan refugee diaspora became a global stage for the Buddhism-science encounter during “the Decade of the Brain” (1990s), monastic critics working along the epistemic and institutional margins of the early Mind & Life Dialogues (1987-1995) sought to elaborately refuse “the closure principle” of exclusive materialism. Their previously unstudied efforts elaborately extended a four-century history of Inner Asian Buddhist engagements with European-derived naturalism, and brought new bio-modern objects like “neurons” and “cells” into the disciplinary arenas of classical South and Inner Asian medicine, tantric physiology, and Mahāyā-na philosophy. I argue that attention to this flush of materialist and moral thinking about the tyranny of the very small (“the microscopic sublime”) lends itself to several experimental projects in the critical Asian humanities: diversifying our sources for a global history of neurocultures, refusing the chronic psychologization of Buddhist Studies, and delinking from the category blindness of religion-science.
About the speaker
Matthew W. King is Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He currently serves as UCR’s Director of Asian Studies, Co-Director of the Medical & Health Humanities, and Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Health Humanities & Disability Justice Lab. A historian of Inner Asian Buddhism, Matthew’s published work has explored scholastic thought along the Tibet-Mongol interface on such topics as the 13th-14th century Mongol Empire, philology and tantric self-cultivation in the 18th-19th centuries, literati cultures in the Qing Empire, and biomedical modernity, humanism, and Orientalism amidst socialist state building in the 20th century. His first book, Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire (Columbia University Press, 2019), won several awards, including the American Academy of Religion’s 2020 award for Best Book in Textual Study. Other recent books include In the Forest of the Blind: The Eurasian Journey of Faxian’s Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Columbia University Press, 2022) and, with Khenpo Kunga Sherab, The Amazing Treasury of the Sakya Lineage (Simon & Schuster/Wisdom Publications, 2024).
For questions and the reading group materials, please contact Christoph Emmrich at christoph.emmrich@utoronto.ca.
Join on Zoom Passcode: 989442
- Associated reading group event, February 7, "The Contents are the Vessel: Snod Bcud beyond Nature"
- See 2024-25 SCHEDULE OF EVENTS FOR YEHAN NUMATA PROGRAM IN BUDDHIST STUDIES