Buddhist Philosophy between India and China: From Madhyamaka to Sanlun
Abstract
As part of a Starting Grant funded by the European Research Council devoted to the study of Chinese Buddhist philosophy, a workshop on ‘Buddhist Philosophy between India and China: From Madhyamaka to Sanlun’ is scheduled to be held at the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia (IKGA), part of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW), in Vienna on 17–18 August 2024.
The research project of which this workshop forms parts is titled The Ethics of Empty Beliefs: Chinese Buddhist Philosophy in the ‘Period of Disunity’ (ChinBuddhPhil). Centrally concerned with the Sanlun 三論 school most closely associated with Sengzhao 僧肇 and Jizang 吉藏, the project intends to study Sanlun’s contributions to Chinese Buddhist philosophy in historical and systematic manner, with an especial focus on the ethics of belief. In so doing, the project hopes to transform the conventional understanding of philosophically valuable traditions by demonstrating that Chinese Buddhist philosophers merit consideration not only as historical artifacts but as genuinely interesting and insightful contributors to live philosophical problems. It likewise aims to redress the preponderant exclusion of Chinese perspectives from philosophically oriented scholarship in Buddhist studies, and to do so in a manner that bridges it with philologically oriented Buddhology.
This workshop will be devoted to Sanlun in conversation with its Indian antecedents. More particularly, the aim is to study the transmission of religious and/or/cum philosophical ideas and arguments between Buddhist South Asia and the Chinese world in the early centuries of the common era, specifically in a bid to unearth and evaluate Chinese Sanlun’s distinctive contributions to and elaborations on Indian Madhyamaka.
CHINBUDDHPHIL
This workshop is being organized by the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia (IKGA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) with support from the project “The Ethics of Empty Beliefs: Chinese Buddhist Philosophy in the ‘Period of Disunity’” (ChinBuddhPhil). This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon research and innovation programme (2022 Starting Grant agreement No. 101077136).
Registration
To register for on-site participation, please write to rafal.stepien(at)oeaw.ac.at before Friday, August 9, 2024.