Jan Nattier: "Re-reading the Scripture in Forty-two Sections: New Tools for an Old Task"

BY INVITATION ONLY

Abstract:

In this two-day workshop we will do a close reading of the Scripture in Forty-two Sections, long thought to have been the first Buddhist scripture translated into Chinese. After a brief consideration of its introductory narrative section (or “preface”), which had led to the idea of its production in the 1st c. CE (but is now generally considered to be little more than a pious fiction), we will focus on the content of the scripture itself.  As we work our way through these sections we will pay particular attention to citations from the scripture in Buddhist and non-Buddhist sources, notably the Daoist Zhen’gao, as well as searching for parallels to its distinctive vocabulary and content elsewhere in the Chinese Buddhist canon.  In the process we will also consider what this evidence can show us about where and when the text was produced, the way in which it was compiled, and the genre to which it belongs.

Bio:

Jan Nattier did her undergraduate work in comparative religion (specializing in Buddhism) at Indiana University, where she also began graduate training in the Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1988 under the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies (specializing in classical Mongolian). She has taught at Macalester College, the University of Hawaii, Stanford University, Indiana University, and the University of Tokyo, before serving as Research Professor at the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology (Soka University, Tokyo, Japan) from 2006-2010. Subsequently she has taught as a Visiting Professor at Stanford University, the University of Washington, and the University of California at Berkeley, where she is currently a Visiting Scholar. Her publications include Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Philosophy of Decline (1991), A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path according to the Inquiry of Ugra (2003), and A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations (2008), as well as a variety of journal articles, encyclopedia entries, and book reviews.