Up to now, we have had little sense of Tibetan lifespans before the 20th century. The Buddhist Digital Resource Center hosts the largest online biographical database on Tibet and includes data on the lifespans of some 2000 famous Tibetan lamas. Working with a research assistant, I have sorted this data by time periods and found interesting patterns in longevity in relation to historic events. Most surprising, over the centuries, average lifespan in Tibet significantly declined from the mid-10th to the mid-20th century. I also make comparisons to the data available on the Dharma Drug Digital Database of some 6000 Chinese monks. I will discuss the implications of the patterns discerned through analysis of this data, asking what this data tells us about the lives of lamas and what the lives of lamas tell us about Tibetan society and history.

Please join us for a talk by MK Long (PhD Candidate, Department of Asian Studies).

This paper opens the historical study of initiated female Buddhist devotees (thilashin) in Myanmar through analysis of the 1982 biography of Daw Medawadi (1862-1932), founder of a Buddhist nunnery (chaung) at the turn of the twentieth century. Attending to rhetorical models of practice that reveal the stakes of the historically specific and local social worlds in which thilashin have sought to establish and maintain institutional footholds, I reconsider the assumed predominance of tropes of renunciatory asceticism in the self-presentation of thilashin and propose a more closely calibrated understanding of thilashin as non-ordained but initiated women unevenly empowered by relationships and practices that enable their advancement on a Buddhist path to liberation. In particular, I focus on the biography’s emplacement of its subject, Daw Medawadi, within a family system and within a patronage network as evidence of the meaningful persistence of highly intimate and localized networks of belonging and affiliation amidst the state-driven reorganization of Myanmar Buddhist institutions of the 1980s. Read intertextually with other contemporary, vernacular Burmese literature written by and about thilashin, Medawadi’s life narrative and other thilashin biographies offer a vital and largely untapped source that can contribute to our understanding of the social and historical underpinnings of understudied institutional forms of female Buddhist devotion in Myanmar.

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 paper can be read in advance, by those with a Cornell NetID at this link; interested parties without a NetID may contact MK directly at ml2458@cornell.edu.

The talk is in-person and open to the graduate and professional student community; for accessibility queries please contact buddhiststudies@cornell.edu

The Lingua Mater competition invites alumni to translate Cornell's Alma Mater into a different language and submit a video of the performed translation. The inaugural Lingua Mater alumni competition took place in 2018 as part of Cornell's Global Grand Challenges Symposium. Winners included the Cornell Club of Thailand 2018 and the Cornell Club of Gaeta, Italy in 2019, and won financial support of a local alumni event.

2021 competition details

Can you translate Cornell’s Alma Mater into your mother tongue (or a language you learned at Cornell) and sing it? We invite you to translate “Far Above Cayuga’s Waters” and submit a video of you (and your friends!) performing it, wherever you may be!

Translations do not need to be exact or perfectly in meter but should capture the feel and tune of our university’s Alma Mater. As is customary, include the first verse, refrain, second verse, and refrain in your video submission (for guidance, listen to a performance and read the lyrics).

Video submissions need to be MP4 files at 1920 x 1080 (1080p), in landscape mode with an aspect ratio of 16:9. Please ensure that you have copyright permission for any images/videos you use.

Entries will be reviewed by a panel of judges. Submissions will be judged equally on the translation, the musical quality, and the creativity in visual presentation.

The top entry will receive financial support and Cornell swag for a local alumni event.

Winners will be announced during International Education Week (November 15-19, 2021) via Noteworthy, and the top video will be posted online that week. Be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay in the know of this competition and international alumni activities.

Entries may be submitted by any Cornell alumni groups outside of the United States and Canada.

Submission deadline: Monday, November 8, 2021 at 5 pm ET

SUBMIT YOUR VIDEO AND LYRICS HERE

Please contact the International Alumni Relations team if you have any questions.

The Lingua Mater competition is co-sponsored by the Office of International Alumni Relations, the Language Resource Center, and the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs.

Will the rise of China lead to conflict with the United States? Or is cooperation still possible in the current political order? Joseph S. Nye, Jr., University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus and former Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, offers a fresh perspective on the future of U.S.-China relations, suggesting that cooperative rivalry offers a path to preventing conflict and solving crises.

Join the Center for the Study of Economy & Society for the second installment of its fall lecture series, “The American State in a Multipolar World.” The series features distinguished scholars and public intellectuals: Francis Fukuyama, Joseph Nye Jr., Jeffrey D. Sachs, and Andrew J. Bacevich as they discuss the issues and choices facing the American state in a multipolar global economy and shifting world system. Does maintaining American democracy rely on American hegemony? Is a new Cold War compatible with the priorities of climate change and the covid pandemic, which require inter-state cooperation?

What you will learn:

Whether geopolitical rivalry prevents cooperationHow empowering others helps nations achieve their own goalsThe key challenges facing the international community in the 21st centuryAbout the Speaker:

Joseph S. Nye, Jr. Is University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus and former Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, and earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. He has previously served as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and Deputy Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Diplomacy. He has written extensively on U.S. diplomacy and foreign policy and was named as one of the top 100 Global Thinkers in 2011 by Foreign Policy. His most recent books are Do Morals Matter? (2019), Is the American Century Over? (2015), and Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era (2013).

Whose America? Our America! --- Ayukawa Nobuo and the (Lost) Origin of Postwar Japanese Poetry is the focus of this Rough Work session with our guest speaker Yoshiaki Mihara (Hitotsubashi U. / Tokyo, Japan)

It is generally acknowledged that post-WWII Japanese poetry commenced with the formation of a coterie of young poets who called themselves Arechi-ha (“The Waste Land School”). It is also generally acknowledged that the coterie, as its self-naming well suggests, was heavily influenced by T. S. Eliot and his contemporary Modernist poets writing in post-WWI Europe. In this “Rough Work” session, Mihara would like to question the myth of this elective affinity by reading Ayukawa Nobuo (1920-1986), leading poet-critic of the coterie, especially his 1947 long poem “America” with the poet’s own “Notes” attached to it (in an ostensibly Eliotic fashion), together with his highly influential critical prose at that time, so as to examine what was at stake in the original moment of Sengo-shi (“Postwar Poetry”), which overshadows Japanese poetry, if not Japanese literature and criticism in general, even to this day.

Rough Work: Research in progress with an informal discussion for feedback and further exploration.

Legitimating the State: International Orders and Political Imaginations of China,1300-present

This round-table includes Prof. Tim Brook of the University of British Columbia, Professor David Robinson of Colgate University, Professor Jenny Day of Skidmore College, and Mara Yue Du of Cornell University. Panelists will discuss the evolving meaning of "China" and how the self-legitimating state in China interacted with changing domestic and global conditions from the Mongol period to the present.

This event is co-sponsored by the East Asia Program and the Central New York Humanities Corridor.