LECTURE: “Buddhism, Birds, Beasts, and ‘Bat Monks’: Defining and Defying Categories Through Analogical Thinking in East Asian Buddhism”

Programme

Abstract
There has been much consideration of the nature of the relationship between humans and animals in both science and religion, including within Buddhist Studies. Much of that scholarship has been centered on the interaction between humans and animals and the rich imaginative range of stories about animals in the Buddhist tradition. In this talk, I will take a rather different approach and—drawing on the fascinating work of Douglas Hoffstadter and Emmanuel Sander—consider the ways that Buddhist were close observers of the natural world and drew on specific characteristics of animals to think about larger issues. Animals were a potent source for sophisticated analogies that provided vivid and concrete material to help humans articulate and understand their world. Rather than merely discuss animals as symbols, this talk will foreground issues of categorization and how certain animals that defy easy taxonomic classification, such as bats, were used throughout East Asia to draw precise analogies with those things which defied classification in the human world. This talk will focus in particular on the long-overlooked category of the “bat monk” (bianfu seng 蝙蝠僧, niaoshu seng 鳥鼠僧) as it appears within the Buddhist traditions of East Asia. Along the way we will reflect on the different—and conflicting—images of bats in western culture and in the cultures of East Asia. That broader discussion will help to contextualize the more detailed discussion that follows about the importance of this category within the religious history of East Asia and also enrich our understanding of why bats were such apposite creatures for use in analogies within the Buddhist tradition.

About the Speaker
James Robson is the James C. Kralik and Yunli Lou Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Victor and William Fung Director of the Harvard University Asia Center. He specializes in the history of East Asian religious traditions. He is the author of Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak [Nanyue 南嶽] in Medieval China (Harvard Asia Center, 2009), which was awarded the Stanislas Julien Prize for 2010 by the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres and the 2010 Toshihide Numata Book Prize in Buddhism. He is the editor of the 2015 Norton Anthology of World Religions: Daoism (W.W. Norton & Company) and the co-editor of Images, Relics and Legends: The Formation and Transformation of Buddhist Sacred Sites (Toronto) and Buddhist Monasticism in East Asia: Places of Practice (Routledge). He is currently completing a book titled The Daodejing: A Biography (Princeton University Press).

About the FASS Distinguished Lecture Series in Buddhist Studies
The annual FASS Distinguished Lecture Series in Buddhist Studies, funded by an endowment established via a generous donation by the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and Museum, brings a distinguished professor in Buddhist Studies to the National University of Singapore.