Please join us for a talk by Eugene Wang (Harvard).

A Buddhist cave decorated with scenes of meditation at once makes perfect sense and no sense at all. It makes sense in view of the centrality of meditation in Buddhist imagination and practice. It makes no sense in that nowhere in Buddhist discourse do we ever find the instruction that meditation involves looking at wall paintings about meditation. Current scholarship is also polarized into camps of either affirmer and deniers. Affirmers regard meditation as the central function of decorated caves. Deniers see them as sites of mortuary function, having nothing to do with meditation. Meditation and memorial are thus seen as mutually exclusive. It will be shown that they are actually mutually dependent. Meditation is not the function of decorated Buddhist caves, but its narrative frame; memorial is essential to such caves, only that it often takes the narrative form of meditation.

The Cornell Buddhist Studies Seminar Series is co-sponsored by the GPSA-FC, the Departments of Anthropology, Asian Studies and Philosophy, by the South Asia Program, and by the Society for the Humanities. The Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies also generously co-sponsors Prof. Wang's talk. The talk is open to all members of the Cornell community; for accessibility queries please contact buddhiststudies@cornell.edu