Trent Walker: "Cetanābhedā and Cinderella: Multiple Rebirths, Bilingual Sermons, and Popular Narratives in Southeast Asia"

Date
Thursday April 22nd 2021, 7:00 - 8:30PM
Event Sponsor
Department of Religious Studies, The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford
Location
Virtual via Zoom
Cetanabheda and Cinderella: Multiple Rebirths, Bilingual Sermons, and Popular Narratives in SE Asia
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Talk is via Zoom. Registration required. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Register here.

The Cetanābhedā, an eighteenth-century Pali-vernacular bilingual text or “bitext” for public sermons, aims to reconcile local Southeast Asian notions of plural “minds” or “souls” with the normative Buddhist model of rebirth. The resulting doctrine holds that our multiple minds can be scattered across samsara after death and thereby be mixed together with those of other living beings, generating much of the physical, social, and psychological diversity more commonly attributed to karma. This talk traces the Cetanābhedā through Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and Yunnan, demonstrating how its bitextual format allowed for the dissemination of new ideas and the transformation of popular narratives, including a version of Cinderella.

Bio:
Trent Walker
Postdoctoral Fellow of The HCBSS
Lecturer, Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University

Trent Walker specializes in Southeast Asian Buddhism, including ritual, manuscript, and translation cultures in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. Recent publications include articles on Cambodian Dharma songs, Thai literary history, and translation practices in southern Vietnam. He is working on his first book, Classical Reading, Vernacular Writing: A Bitextual History of Mainland Southeast Asian Letters, 1450–1850, which argues that a distinct mode of translation was the core intellectual and literary activity in early modern Theravada Buddhist cultures.