Conference Panels Organized

1. “Performing Time in Buddhist Literature: Creative Re-imaginings of Past, Present and Future.” American Academy of Religion (AAR), Buddhism Unit, 2022. Presenters: Elaine Lai, Sinae Kim, Adam Miller, Shayne Dahl. Respondent: Natalie Gummer. Presider: Chenxing Han.

   “Buddhist literature throughout time has danced between multiple temporalities, inducting its audiences into narratives that presence the past, predict the future, and transcend both. The narratives of crisis and catastrophe rampant in our contemporary moment offer a unique opportunity to call into question a liberal secular vision of linear, progressive as a norm, and instead to look to alternative temporal framings as a way to re-imagine our relationship to past, present, and future. Our panel looks to temporal plays in Buddhist writings as a resource to transform our collective narrative. Our topics span from creative interpretations of the nidāna “At one time,” to affective responses of joy as a way to rewrite the past and future, to narrativizing the moment of straying into samsaric existence as a continual expression of gnosis, to ritual performances of the Heart Sūtra as an inter-religious performance of unity in the aftermath of disaster.”

Conference Presentations

1. “Playing with Time: Great Perfection History in Virtual Reality.” ITCH: Immersive Technologies and Cultural Heritage, University of Southern California. Co-presented with Aftab Hafeez.

   The Great Perfection (Tibetan: རྫོགས་ཆེན་ Dzogchen) is a Buddhist tradition that gained popularity in Tibet from the 11th-14th centuries and remains a significant branch of Tibetan Buddhism today. This virtual reality project traces the teacher-student relationships within the three major transmission streams of the Great Perfection. Transmission refers to the unbroken passing down of Buddhist teachings from teacher to student. The three transmission streams are associated with three pivotal figures: 1) Vairocana, 2) Vimalamitra, and 3) Padmasambhava (all c. 8th century). In this tradition, it is said that to gain confidence in the Great Perfection teachings, one must first understand the history. However, these histories are notoriously complex and non-linear, making them difficult to grasp. This project represents the first attempt ever to depict Great Perfection history with VR, enabling users to learn about it with greater ease and engagement. The app allows users to view the lineage transmission holistically, tracing data from teacher to student, starting with the first Buddhas who exist prior to concepts of time. Users can navigate the lineage tree, exploring relationships between different entities from various perspectives. Clicking on each figure reveals relevant information on a panel designed to resemble a traditional Tibetan scripture page called a pecha.

2. Tantra of the Sun Through Time: An Intertextual Heatmap.” 7th International Seminar of Young Tibetologists (ISYT), Oxford University. Panel on “Digital Humanities in Tibetan Studies: Methodologies and Approaches.” 2024.

   Tantra of the Sun (Klong gsal ’bar ma) is regarded as the eighteenth tantra of the famous Seventeen Tantras (rgyud bcu bdun) that form the scriptural basis for the Pith Instruction Series (man ngag sde) of Dzogchen Heart Essence (rdzogs chen snying thig) tradition. Early Heart Essence literature (11th to 14th centuries) consists of two main streams: 1) Heart Essence of Vimalamitra (Bi ma snying thig) and 2) Heart Essence of the Ḍākinī (mkha’ ’gro snying thig), both of which were codified in Longchenpa’s Fourfold Heart Essence (snying thig ya bzhi). While the earlier Heart Essence tradition, Heart Essence of Vimalamitra, cites from the Seventeen Tantras, Heart Essence of the Ḍākinī yokes Tantra of the Sun to the Seventeen Tantras as the eighteenth tantra and elevates its status by marking it as uniquely transmitted to Padmasambhava, but not Vimalamitra. Tantra of the Sun thus represents a kind of pivot scripture in the evolution of the early Heart Essence tradition in Tibet, coinciding with the widening influence of Padmasambhava. What did this tantra represent for the Heart Essence tradition overall? How was it integrated and used to promote Heart Essence of the Ḍākinī? This paper will introduce the four different versions of Tantra of the Sun found in the Nyingma Gyubum and the Nyingma Kama. I will then briefly outline the contents of the version of Tantra of the Sun which is cited the most within Longchenpa’s Fourfold Heart Essence. To give the audience a sense of how Tantra of the Sun moves through Longchenpa’s collection, I will provide a visual “heat map” prototype of the tantra where every instance its citations appear within Fourfold Heart Essence is highlighted and hyperlinked to its citational context. I will conclude with an analysis of which chapters and passages are cited the most, and what this indicates about Tantra of the Sun’s reception history.

3. “Buddhist Literature as Queer Time.” American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). Panel on “Alternative Cosmologies of Time.” 2024.

   This paper theorizes on what it means to be a religious studies scholar of premodern religion, while being located in a body, place, and time that is both distant from but also resonant with the Buddhist literature I read with. I consider how Buddhist literature stretches and plays with time in imaginative ways that challenge the oppressive logics of America’s forward moving narrative of progressive time, a narrative that perpetuates and sanctifies cycles of racialized and gendered violence. Using Buddhist texts of the Great Perfection tradition in Tibet as my case study, I argue that this genre of literature presents a fundamentally queer notion of time that continually subverts linear conceptions of past, present, and future. I juxtapose Buddhist narrations of time with the work of scholars at the nexus of Religious Studies, Black Studies, and queer studies to propose an anti-colonial reading of Buddhist literature that will help us to imagine more life-giving ways of narrating our own relationships with time and with each other.

4. “Confronting and Healing America’s Racialized Karma.” American Academy of Religion (AAR), Collective Karma Unit on “Karma Cluster Concepts: Racialized Karma, Popular Sovereignty, Healing, and Ethical Formation.” 2023.

   “What does collective karma mean in the context of America? In his book, America’s Racial Karma, Larry Ward, who was a student of Thich Nhat Hanh, criticized American culture for “holding onto the belief that America’s inherent goodness will prevail, even when faced with live footage of state brutality” (94). Building upon Ward’s work, this paper seeks to confront the harmful histories of othering that have been and continue to be occluded by the myth of a progressive, forward-moving America. Juxtaposing Ward with other Buddhist and non-Buddhist writings, this paper argues that the dominant story of America perpetuates a collective amnesia, ultimately bypassing the labor needed to heal the wounds of America’s racialized karma. This presentation will end with creative pairings of Buddhist theories of interdependency with work by adrienne maree brown, and Judith Butler to consider how attending to the body may be a constructive first step towards healing.”

5. “Straying into samsaric time according to Heart Essence Literature.” American Academy of Religion (AAR), Buddhism Unit on “Performing Time in Buddhist Literature: Creative Re-imaginings of Past, Present and Future.” 2022.

   “Samsaric time has traditionally been portrayed in a negative sense; wandering in cyclic existence is a perpetual form of suffering propelled by afflictive karma. My paper seeks to understand what other modes of Buddhist temporality are available for us to consider the question of suffering and its repetitive cycles. How might Buddhists have experienced themselves as temporal beings in a more enlivening way? Using a previously unstudied Heart Essence (snying thig) tantra called Tantra of the Sun: Blazing Luminous Matrix of Samantabhadrī (Kun tu bzang mo klong gsal ’bar ma nyi ma’i rgyud) that features a female Buddha speaking to a group of ḍākinīs, I argue that this tantra performs multiple temporalities on its readers, inviting us to experience the pivotal moment of straying from primordial gnosis into samsaric existence as an expansive creative act in which infinite possibilities for liberation co-emerge within every unfolding moment.”

6. “Reconciliation, Refuge, Regeneration: Weavings from Buddhist Asian America,” co-authored by Elaine Lai & Chenxing Han. American Academy of Religion (AAR) Western Region, Asian American Studies Unit, 2022.

   “The process of healing after incidents of racialized hatred does not conform to a linear narrative, nor can it be achieved by an individual who is cut off from community. Forgiveness cannot be prematurely forced by bypassing anger and grief; reconciliation becomes a moot point when a wound has not yet come to a head. In this presentation, Elaine Lai, president of the Buddhist Community at Stanford (BCAS), and Chenxing Han, author of Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists (2021) will reflect on healing as an ongoing process that manifests in fragmentary, often unquantifiable ways: online friendships; ripening silences; collective kintsugi, or mending broken pottery with seams of gold; laughing together, and also crying together. Healing necessitates a reckoning with the history of erasure of Asian American Buddhists that has left many of us feeling disembodied. Healing also means recognizing ways in which Asian Americans are not a unified whole, but in and of themselves, fragmentary, diverse, imperfect, and learning. In recognition of the fact that our subjectivities interweave, and that healing can only be achieved in community, we will experiment with collective writing, piecing together vignettes, snapshots, moments of turbulence, release, and joy from this past year and beyond. We will show that resisting a single narrative of the Asian American Buddhist experience, uplifting each other’s stories in all their complexity, and imagining other stories into being through playwriting and memoir, can be a source of tremendous strength and regeneration.”

7. “Collectively Reimagining the Awakening Narrative, from the Buddhist Community at Stanford (BCAS)” co-presented by Elaine Lai & Cahron Cross. American Academy of Religion (AAR) Western Region, Religion, Literature and Film Unit, 2022.

   “During the last year of pandemic lock-down, at the height of anti-Asian violence throughout the United States, the Buddhist Community at Stanford (BCAS) began to fortify our bonds through an online community where participants interrogated our relationship as embodied beings, to each other, to place, and to stories that have been unjustly projected onto us. Rather than reconcile, we have sought to reckon with the ugliness of our inherited past and present, including the fact that Buddhist stories have been focused almost exclusively on a particular image of the masculine, of a perfected male-bodied human being as the pinnacle of freedom. Born out of these conversations was the blueprint for a play called Blue Lotus, a story about enlightenment in female form which relocates the entire awakening narrative to the community, and also away from the human, into the realm of nature, silence, and seeing deeply into that which hurts the most. In this presentation, the two co-presidents of BCAS, Elaine Lai & Cahron Cross will share the process of how we created an audio version of this play, and how our Buddhist community came together to role-play these different characters, sending in audio files from all over the world. We will share how for all of us—cast, crew, and writers alike—the process of embodying this new story of awakening has helped us to reframe our relationships to place, and to reconnect with the possibility for freedom and agency in a world that is endlessly violent.”