The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford

Christian Luczanits: Mustang Art and the Myth of the Hidden Kingdom

Christian Luczanits talks about the eccentricities of early Buddhist art in the Mustang region of the Himalayas, the intellectual exchange that ran through the region long before its 15th-century kingdom, and the importance of documenting the manuscripts and sculptures of mountain monasteries in situ. Interview by Miles Osgood.

Chiew Hui Ho: The Lives of Sūtras

Chiew Hui Ho talks about parasutraic texts in medieval China that chronicle devotion to specific sūtras, how these histories give us a picture of “Buddhism on the ground” distinct from that of miracle tales, and how scriptures like the Diamond Sūtra and Lotus Sūtra thereby develop lives and biographies of their own. Interview by Miles Osgood.

Joshua Capitanio: The Work of the Scholar-Librarian

Joshua Capitanio talks about his graduate work on medieval Chinese Buddho-Daoism, how translation projects and “second book” arguments are valued inside and outside the professoriate, and what it takes to make a career transition to the university library. Interview by Miles Osgood.

Book Notes: Meir Shahar, "Kings of Oxen and Horses"

Meir Shahar talks about the cult worship of the “Ox King” and the “Horse King” in China. Working at the intersection of scriptural studies and field research, Shahar connects the two animal gods back to Sākyamuni and Avalokiteśvara through locally transmitted manuscripts and their Indic sources, and he describes the unorthodox Buddhist priests in Guizhou Province who perform rituals for draft animals using these textual manuals. Kings of Oxen and Horses: Draft Animals, Buddhism, and Chinese Rural Religion (Columbia University Press, 2025). Interview by Miles Osgood. Talk from April 11, 2024 at HCBSS: Meir Shahar, “Buddhism and Chinese Rural Religion.” https://buddhiststudies.stanford.edu/events/meir-shahar-buddhism-and-chinese-rural-religion [https://buddhiststudies.stanford.edu/events/meir-shahar-buddhism-and-chinese-rural-religion]

Book Notes: Adeana McNicholl, "Of Ancestors and Ghosts"

Adeana McNicholl talks about the misunderstood realm of the “pretas,” typically translated as the home of “hungry ghosts” but in fact host to an entire history of the ancestral “departed.” Following Indic "preta" narratives from their Brahmanical ritual origins through the construction of a Buddhist karmic cosmology, McNicholl considers the moral aesthetics of punishments designed to disgust, the gendered appetites of semi-divine seductresses, and the Sanskrit story that puts the whole chronology of "preta" literature back together. Of Ancestors and Ghosts: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2024). Interview by Miles Osgood. Adeana McNicholl, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University, is a scholar of Buddhism in premodern South Asia and in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Her first book, "Of Ancestors and Ghosts" (Oxford University Press, 2024), examines the historical development of the Buddhist "preta," or ghost, through narrative literature, asserting the importance of ghost stories for the creation of cosmological ideas. Her current book project, tentatively titled "Black Buddhism: A Religious History of Afro-Asian Solidarity," illustrates the importance of Buddhism for the conceptualization of Blackness within transnational anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-caste movements. Her other projects include a documentary reader on Black Buddhism, which she is co-editing with Ralph H. Craig III, and the Buddhism and Caste Initiative, co-directed with Nicholas Witkowski.