Tibetan Graduate Studies Seminar

Oxford University
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The Tibetan Graduates Studies Seminar (TGSS) is a weekly series of colloquia and guest lectures at the Oriental Institute. The intended purpose of the TGSS is to give MPhil and DPhil candidates a platform to present their work-in-progress and receive feedback from staff and affiliated scholars of the field. Additionally, the weekly time slot will also allow visiting scholars to present their current research. They are provided with the opportunity to engage in similar ways with both students and fellows of the Tibetan Studies department.

  1. MAR 4 · VIDEO

    Nidhi (treasure) in the Jayadrathayāmala, a 10th century tantric compendium from Kashmir (Oxford Treasure Seminar Series)

    Olga Serbaeva describes how the Jayadrathayāmala envisaged magically discovered nidhi (treasure) as an integral part of its soteriological program. Tantric texts dedicate special chapters to the search for nidhi (treasures). The vision of hidden treasures is considered to be a siddhi (supernatural ability) that occurs after many thousand rounds of mantra repetition, and other rituals. Generally, nidhi is considered material treasures, i.e. gold, precious stones, and any other objects related to becoming wealthy. In JY, there is a strong link between nidhi and Kubera, and a particular form of Kālī, called Nidhīśvarī or Kuberajananī, from JY.4.54, once propitiated, bestows the treasures to the sādhakas. Another aspect, closer to the visionary nature of the experiences leading to finding treasures, shall allow us to bring in the JY materials on the altered states of consciousness, where the visionary switch happens in particular conditions after particular auditive and physical forerunning signs. We shall discover how nidhi fits among other consciousness-altering practices such as āveśa/svasthāveśa, khorika, prasena. The prescriptive JY shall be compared to the flowery Kathāsāritsāgara, a text recompiled by Somadeva in the late 11th century Kashmir, reusing some contemporary tantric references and materials.

    53 min

  2. FEB 11 · VIDEO

    Treasure and archaeology: reflections on the Begram hoard and the interpretation of deposits of valuable objects (Oxford Treasure Seminar Series)

    Lauren Morris examines archaeologically discovered hoards: how does one tell if their concealment was pragmatic, or ritual? And can one always even make such distinctions? Of its many referents in archaeology, ‘treasure’ can also describe rediscovered deposits of valuables, which are widespread in the global archaeological record, and can illuminate various social, ritual, economic, and historical phenomena. Realising this capacity, however, implies interpreting the nature of these deposits – something highly theorised in some domains of archaeology (e.g., Bronze Age Europe; numismatics), and barely of interest in others. Pivoting around the case of the ‘hoard’ of valuable objects discovered at Begram in Afghanistan – deposited between the late 3rd/early 4th century CE and always interpreted as concealed for safekeeping but unluckily never recovered – I present an eclectic review of how such ‘treasure’ has been negotiated in various archaeological traditions. This includes classificatory schemes attempting to distinguish ritual (e.g., votive, funerary, without intending recovery) vs. utilitarian (e.g., temporary safekeeping) deposits, and criticisms of the validity and utility of these categories. I conclude by considering which ‘universal’ insights may emerge from these debates, and the open question of their compatibility with textually documented historical conceptions and traditions of treasure.

    51 min

  3. 12/19/2024 · VIDEO

    Do they think money grows on trees? Yakṣas, nāgās and nidhis (Oxford Treasure Seminar Series)

    John Guy looks at the embracing presence of gods of place in early Buddhist art. This talk begins with the premise that subcontinental ancient India was marked by the embracing presence of gods of place. The pervasiveness of local deities, as later codified in such texts as the Mahāmāyūri and the governing deities of the Uttarādhyayana Sūtra, point to their localized nature and named identities. The former lists them according to the place each presides as the tutelary deity, the latter by iconographic features. As we move into the first millennium, the constellation of pan-Indian deities coalesces around a defined pantheon, reducing the religious spaces occupied by these nature deities, and seemingly marginalizing those that survive. A question that has long vexed art historians of early historic South Asia is the relationship of image to text. The antiquity of texts describing - and presumed to be prescribing – the way images of deities are represented, broadly speaking, appear to postdate surviving imagery. In presenting a corpus of the earliest extant imagery from subcontinental India, we will examine the place of yakṣas, nāgās and nidhis in this shifting devotional landscape and their afterlife in a polytheistic system.

    1h 3m

  4. 11/29/2024 · VIDEO

    Deep Histories: the ground-waters of serpentine treasure guardians (Oxford Treasure Seminar Series)

    Veronica Strang explores the role of serpentine water beings as guardians of treasures. Drawing examples from a major comparative study of water deities in diverse cultural and historical contexts (Strang 2023), this paper explores how and why these serpentine beings have a historically recurrent role as the guardians of cultural treasures. Appearing ubiquitously in early human histories, water deities are supernatural personifications of the powers of water and its generative capacities. They surface in cosmic origin stories as world creators; they act as hydro-theological generators of human life and consciousness; they bring hydrological cycles of life surging through ecosystems, and they are authoritative sources (and sometimes enforcers) of social and material order. Water beings are therefore literally essential figures in all processes of production and reproduction and in the generation of wealth and health. This paper suggests that this central generative role leads to a consistent relationship with materials and objects similarly valorised as representing wealth and generative capacity, and therefore defined as treasure. There is an intrinsic logic in having elemental wealth-creating beings extend their powers to control and protect material culture encapsulating the same meanings. Indeed, such objects are often used to venerate these water deities themselves. Thus the shared role of water beings as wealth generators across diverse cultural and historical contexts is echoed in a similarly recurrent role as serpentine treasure guardians.

    53 min

  5. 07/05/2024 · VIDEO

    Asian Territorial Deity Cosmologies as Vehicles for the Transmission of Buddhadharma (Oxford Treasure Seminar Series)

    Robert Mayer's analysis of Guru Chowang's enduring connection between territorial deity cosmologies and the preservation of hidden teachings in Tibetan Buddhism Academic scholars are accustomed to understanding gter as sacred texts often associated with Padmasambhava, within a cult deriving historically from ancient imperial burials. Yet the great 13th-century Padmasambhava devotee Guru Chowang primarily understood gter, by definition, within a mundane framework, barely mentioning Padmasambhava at first, and with not a word about ancient tombs. Even more striking about Chowang’s understandings of gter are their widespread and continuing persistence, as suggested by recent ethnographies of Tibet’s territorial deity cosmologies. For rather than place ancient tombs at the centre of his analysis, Chowang looked to popular terrestrial deity cosmologies to provide a vehicle for Padmasambhava’s hidden teachings. This graft of Indian Buddhist notions of transcendent, spiritual, transmission onto mundane Tibetan territorial deity cosmologies still thrives to this day. Indeed, Tibetan scholars understood Indian Buddhism previously to have made a similar use of India’s nāga and yakṣa territorial deity cosmologies for the concealment and rediscovery of Buddhist teachings.

    41 min

  6. 07/05/2024 · VIDEO

    Nāgas and relic treasures in the Mahāvaṃsa (Oxford Treasure Seminar Series)

    Kristin Scheible uncovers the hidden role of nāgas in defining Buddhist treasures and explores their surprising significance in safeguarding sacred relics through early texts Much of the literature on nāgas in Indian Buddhist monasticism has focused on their rain-making and monastery-protecting duties. However, early Buddhist texts are full of narratives about nāgas serving the Buddha, dharma, and saṅgha by guarding in their subterranean palaces a variety of specifically Buddhist treasures. For example, nāgas played exactly this role in an important Pāli Buddhist text from Nāgārjuna’s roughly contemporaneous and neighbouring Sri Lanka, the Dīpavaṃsa. The fifth century Mahāvaṃsa enhances the depiction of nāgas as hoarders and valuers of treasures. Scheible argues that nāgas were not background characters in the Pāli Buddhist imaginaire around Nāgārjuna’s time; by stealing, hoarding, and venerating various types of sacred relics of the Buddha in their nāgaloka they in fact define what a treasure is.

    42 min

  7. 06/13/2024 · VIDEO

    The Successive Avatars of the Heart Essence of the Ḍākinī: Termas as Continuous Revelation (Oxford Treasure Seminar Series)

    Team presentation on the project "For a Critical History of the Northern Treasures" (FCHNT) Research into the main rDzogs chen cycle of the Northern Treasures, the dGongs pa zang thal (c. 1366), easily shows that a large part of it is a rewritten version of the mKha' 'gro snying thig. A prophecy in the dGongs pa zang thal even presents it as such. This talk will summarize the results of the FCHNT's research into the gradual revelation of the mKha' 'gro snying thig: after its initial discovery in 1313, it appears to have been rewritten and expanded several times, a problem that is intertwined with that of the only gradual decipherment of the brda yig, which for the mKha' 'gro snying thig does not appear to have been fully completed until 1331, and possibly not even until Klong chen pa finalized the text, perhaps as late as the 1340s. There is also evidence of an ongoing process of "translating" the brda yig for the Northern Treasures literature, which continued until late in the life of Rig 'dzin rGod ldem. This presentation will sketch a research project whose axis would be to consider what Tibetan tradition presents as distinct terma cycles as successive versions of one and the same text, exploring this heuristic hypothesis on a first corpus: the entire Padma snying thig category within the Rin chen gter mdzod. To what extent can the termas of Rin chen gling pa, rDo rje gling pa, Padma gling pa, and others, including bsTan gnyis gling pa's additions to rGod ldem's Lung phag mo zab rgya, be considered variations of one and the same text? Can we establish a typology to divide the rDzogs chen corpus (etc.) into groups of cycles, which would then be successive layers in the ongoing process of rewriting a single corpus over decades and sometimes centuries, in a continuous work involving many individuals? The key idea is that Cantwell's (2020) findings from the liturgical works of the Düdjom Vajrakīlaya traditions might seem to apply to terma literature as a whole, if properly divided into typological categories.

    41 min

  8. 06/13/2024 · VIDEO

    Concealed Prosperity: Why People and Territorial Deities Need Treasures (Oxford Treasure Seminar Series)

    This talk explores the intricate cosmology of territorial deities in Tibet and related concepts of land, prosperity, and fecundity, as well as sociality and socio-political organisation This talk explores the intricate cosmology of territorial deities in Tibet and related concepts of land, prosperity, and fecundity, as well as sociality and socio-political organisation. Tibet hosts a vast number of territorial deities. The most powerful ones occupy the highest glacier-capped mountains. These divine lords guard their lands, and people, and others within. They also guard different kinds of concealed ‘treasures’ (ter, terma) – precious substances hidden within the land, such as metals (typically gold), minerals, stones, medicines, water sources, divine objects (weapons and others), special landscapes, as well as Buddhist statues, texts, and other articles. Such ‘treasures’ are conceptualised as crucial in maintaining the prosperity of the land and the very existence of its inhabitants. The land and its ‘treasures’ belonging to territorial deities hold the crucial forces of life and wellbeing (such as yang, cha, la, chü, trashi, tsé, ngödrup, pel, lungta) that people need to protect and acquire to live, produce offspring, and tackle disease. These underlying principles of Tibeto-Himalayan environmental cosmology have parallels in other cultures.

    47 min
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About

The Tibetan Graduates Studies Seminar (TGSS) is a weekly series of colloquia and guest lectures at the Oriental Institute. The intended purpose of the TGSS is to give MPhil and DPhil candidates a platform to present their work-in-progress and receive feedback from staff and affiliated scholars of the field. Additionally, the weekly time slot will also allow visiting scholars to present their current research. They are provided with the opportunity to engage in similar ways with both students and fellows of the Tibetan Studies department.

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