How might all the gold and glimmer interact or complement your experience in Buddhist monasteries — spaces of quietude, meditation, and reflection? Or what might birds, bats, and beasts share in common with Buddhist monks?

Following an endowment established through the generous donation of the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and Museum to NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) in 2021, faculty members, students, and the general public now enjoy insightful and intriguing lectures delivered by distinguished professors in Buddhist Studies at the annual FASS Distinguished Lecture Series in Buddhist Studies, organized by the FASS Research Division. As both a secular and interdisciplinary field, Buddhist Studies at NUS aspires to further both scholarly and public understanding of Buddhist traditions.

Bolstering this support of Buddhist Studies initiative here in FASS was another gift from Foo Hai Ch’an Monastery, formally presented on 28 June 2022. This donation seeks to support a faculty fellowship and graduate scholarships in Buddhist Studies, which have been rolled out in August 2023. Advancing the growth of this initiative too is the recent launch of Mee Toh Foundation Visiting Professorship in Buddhist Studies, following the foundation’s gift last month. This professorship further augments FASS’ Buddhist Studies capacity to foster deep and diverse perspectives into Buddhist history, philosophy, art, and literature.

On 14 October 2022, eminent scholar Professor Justin McDaniel from University of Pennsylvania delivered the inaugural lecture, entitled “Hypnotic Ecologies and Thin Description in the Study of Southeast Asian Buddhist Art.” Through offering a surface reading of Southeast Asian Buddhists interacting with Buddhist material culture, Prof McDaniel ponders over the ornate and the opulent in monastic spaces. The arguably excessive material culture that permeates these compounds, alongside stimulators of other senses, renders its forest of objects, ornaments, and designs simultaneously seen yet hidden: They cohesively construct an immense, profuse visual experience yet concurrently, each item, each detail remains in the dark, alone in its Buddhist expression of representing and teaching the dharma.

Exactly a year later on 13 October 2023, esteemed scholar Professor James Robson from Harvard University gave a lecture, titled “Buddhism, Birds, Beasts, and ‘Bat Monks’: Defining and Defying Categories Through Analogical Thinking in East Asian Buddhism.” Between popular culture of contemporary times and Buddhist texts in days of old, Prof Robson traces the recurring motif of bats, birds, beasts in describing humans who conduct themselves or exist within the liminal space between “monks” and “laity.” In so doing, his lecture calls to question the taxonomic implications of studying both humans and animals, delving into the curious parallels between specific animal qualities and behaviors, especially those of bats, and humans with unique characteristics.