A lecture by Paul Harrison.

Sunday, May 4th
4:00-5:30 PM PDT

Dharma Realm Buddhist University
South Wing 2nd Floor Lounge
1991 Virtue Way, Ukiah CA

Click here for map to campus

With the dramatic enlargement in the last few decades of our knowledge of the literature of Greater Gandhāra—the cultural zone from present-day Pakistan through Eastern Afghanistan and up into the Tarim Basin—our view of the early history of Mahāyāna Buddhist scriptures has opened up in unexpected ways. One important example is the Pratyutpanna-buddha-saṃmukhāvasthita-samādhi-sūtra, a text that blends the standpoint of the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā) with themes that speak to the strand of Mahāyāna later known as Pure Land. Previously accessible only through Chinese and Tibetan translations and a few scattered pieces in Sanskrit, this sūtra has recently appeared in Gāndhārī fragments written in the Kharoṣṭhī script on birch bark dating to the late 1st/early 2nd century. We now have pieces of five chapters of the sūtra, most as yet unpublished. This talk will review this new evidence, which likely predates the first Chinese translation by Lokakṣema, and explore the light it throws on early Mahāyāna Buddhist doctrine and practice. 

Paul Harrison is the George Edwin Burnell Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University. Educated in his native New Zealand and in Australia, he specializes in Buddhist literature and history, especially that of the Mahāyāna, and in the study of Buddhist manuscripts in Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan. He has edited and translated a number of Buddhist texts, including the Pratyutpanna-buddha-saṃmukhāvasthita-samādhi-sūtra, the Vajracchedikā, and (with Luis Gómez) the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa, and is also one of the editors of the series “Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection.”

For inquiries, please email symposium@drbu.edu
Symposium website: https://www.drbu.edu/symposium