28th – 29th April 2007
Balliol College, University of Oxford,
Lecture room 23

Saturday 28th April

I. The Many Lives of the Buddha

10.30 Welcome, tea/coffee

11.00 Sarah Shaw (Oxford): And that was I: How the Buddha himself creates a path between biography and autobiography
11.45 Max Deeg (Cardiff): Early Chinese biographies of the Buddha

13.00 Lunch

14.15 Roland Steiner (Marburg): Truth in the guise of poetry: Ashvaghosha’s “Life of Buddha”
15.00 Linda Covill (Oxford): Handsome is as handsome does: Ashvaghosha’s story of the Buddha’s younger brother

15.45 Tea/coffee

II. Theravada Biographies in the 20th Century

16.15 Ven. Khammai Dhammasami (Oxford): Seeing myself as another person. The autobiography of a Burmese monastic thinker of the 20th century
17.00 Sarah LeVine (Harvard): Learning, living, spreading the dharma. A post-modern journey from Uku Baha, Lalitpur to Hsilai Monastery, Hacienda Heights, CA: How Ganesh Kumari Shakya became Bhikkhuni Dhammavati

Sunday 29th April

III. Tibet re-narrated: Biographies of Tibetan Masters

9.30 Volker Caumanns (München): The transformation of life into religious biography: The Tibetan scholar-saint Shakya Chogden (1428-1507) seen through the eyes of his biographers
10.15 Alexey Smirnoff (Oxford): The life of Shardza Tashi-gyaltsen, a Bon-po luminary on the borders of contested identities. Tensions between ecumenism and tradition in 19th century Tibet reflected in the life narrative and works of an individual

11.00 Tea/coffee

11.15 Peter Alan Roberts (Hollywood, CA): The evolution of the biography of Milarepa and Rechungpa
12.00 Charles Ramble (Oxford): The good, the bad, and the ugly: Representations of saintly wrong-doing in Tibetan literature

12.45 End of the symposium

13.00 Lunch

Contact: Dr. Ulrike Roesler, Numata Lecturer in Buddhist Studies, Balliol College, and The Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies (OCBS)
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