The Center for Buddhist Studies is glad to announce the third lecture of the Lingyin Buddhist Studies Lecture Series in 2019 fall at the U of A. Professor Raoul Birnbaum is scheduled to present. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Title: TRANSFORMED IN HANGZHOU: THE REAL-LIFE ADVENTURES (MAINLY INTERNAL) OF AN ARTIST-MONK IN THE FIRST DECADES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Speaker: Professor Raoul Birnbaum
Professor of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Date and Time: Oct. 8, 3:30 pm
Location: SILVER & SAGE ROOM OLD MAIN
Suggested Parking: 2nd Street Garage
The celebrated artist Li Shutong (1880-1942) came to live and work in Hangzhou in 1912. Already a mature and established man of the world, within six years he had completely overturned his life to become a Buddhist monk (renamed Hongyi), receiving full ordination at Hangzhou’s Lingyin Monastery in 1918. This talk explores these pivotal early years in Hangzhou, before Hongyi became widely known as one of the great Buddhist masters of the twentieth century. Underneath complex layers of myth and romantic figuring, can we see a real person within this tale of transformation?
Bio: Raoul Birnbaum is Professor of Buddhist Studies, Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research has concentrated on three great themes in the history of Chinese Buddhist life: the major deity cults, visions of the landscape intertwined with religion, and close examination of dimensions of the lives of individuals within this religious field, including the twentieth-century artist-monk Hongyi. In a comparative mode, he also has been engaged in studies of the many worlds and representations of St. Francis, the thirteenth-century Italian, in his Umbrian homeland.