Guest Lecture: On the Interior Life of Master Hongyi 弘一大師 (1880-1942), a Modern Chinese Buddhist Artist-Monk: Three or Four Strands
Raoul BIRNBAUM (University of California Santa Cruz)
Date: 5 – 6:30 pm Thursday, February 6, 2020
Venue: University of California, Berkeley, 3335 Dwinelle Hall
Abstract: What can be said about the interior life of an eminent and multi-talented twentieth-century Chinese Buddhist monk? Can we speak of things below the obvious surface, beyond a sequence of events? How can the life of a complex individual be approached? This talk looks to some core elements of Hongyi’s interior life, set in time, based on consideration of a broad array of primary sources: diaries, essays, dream records, correspondence and other manuscript remains, as well as photographic records and Hongyi’s paintings, calligraphy, poetry, and song compositions.
About the Speaker: Through a career focused on studies of Chinese Buddhist worlds of imagination and practice, Raoul Birnbaum (Professor Emeritus of Buddhist Studies, UCSC) has concentrated on three main topics: the great deity cults of the Chinese Buddhist world; constructions of Chinese geography interwoven with Buddhist conceptions and practices; and the lives of key figures within Chinese Buddhist worlds of the twentieth century, together with their seventeenth-century predecessors and models. He is preparing a book-length study of Master Hongyi and his worlds of practice.
Sponsored by the Center for Buddhist Studies and Tianzhu Academic Network Project.