Colloquium with Prof. Jason A. Carbine, Whittier College

Wednesday, November 4, 2015
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
10383 Bunche Hall
UCLA Campus
Los Angeles, CA 90095

In the 15th century, the Buddhist king Dhammaceti sponsored a sima (ritual boundaries for official acts of the monastic community) reform that was to become the most famous of its kind in mainland Southeast Asia. Having studied the meanings and ramifications of monastic law concerning simas, Dhammaceti sent monks from his kingdom centered in what is now lower Myanmar to Sri Lanka in order to return with a pure ordination line. Upon their return, he then oversaw the implanting of the line in his land, initially via a new Kalyani Sima established under his direction, and then via a wide range of simas all over the kingdom presided over by monks ordained in the Kalyani Sima. In a most significant historical decision, Dhammaceti had an account of these reforms inscribed on ten large stone slabs, which became known as the Kalyani Inscriptions. Copied and preserved in many palm leaf manuscripts, and absorbed into a number of later historical developments, these inscriptions are at their heart a sima text, that is, a text about the regulation of ritual boundaries. This paper examines how Dhammaceti handled his sima case and how the manner in which he did so was situated within various historical, textual, political, and existential agendas.

Jason A. Carbine is the C. Milo Connick Chair of Religious Studies at Whittier College. His research and teaching about religion combines historical and ethnographic approaches, and draws from an interdisciplinary body of research pertaining to the history of religions, textual studies, anthropology, and comparative religious ethics. His publications focus on Buddhism and society in South and Southeast Asia, and he is presently working on a new text and translation of the Kalyani Inscriptions.

Cost : Free and open to the public.

BarbaraGaerlan
310-206-9163
cseas@international.ucla.edu

www.international.ucla.edu/cseas/

Sponsor(s): Center for Buddhist Studies, Center for Southeast Asian Studies