Our first guest of the semester on April 19th was Jan Van Ginkel from Frei Universität, Berlin.His talk focused on Syriac Christianity in Kerala: The History of an Indian Minority from Antiquity until Today". From the beginning of Christianity, there was an "Eastern" side to this story. Although the New…
Seminar on Buddhist and Shaiva Rock-art by Pia Brancaccio In April and May prof. Pia Brancaccio (Drexel University, Philadelphia) held a seminar on "Between Buddhism and Shaivism: Art, rock-art architecture, and religious tradition in ancient Konkan" (with sessions in Italian and English).It explored Shaiva and Buddhist religious traditions through art…
Talk by Florinda De Simini at IIT Bombay: The Place of the Śivadharma in the History of Early Śaivism On February 22nd, Florinda De Simini was at IIT-Bombay to talk about "The Place of the Śivadharma in the History of Early Śaivism".In this lecture she introduced students to the early…
From 25 to 31 January 2023, I, Kengo Harimoto, visited the Oriental Research Institute and Manuscript Library, University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. We have known and have been reading some Śivadharma manuscripts written in the Malayalam script that is used in Kerala. The National Mission for Manuscripts’ online catalogues list…
In January 2023, I travelled to Odisha to explore the links between the representation of Lakulīśa and the Buddha as teachers. The overlap in iconography between these two images suggests that the image of the teaching Buddha was used as a model for the image of Lakulīśa as a teacher.…
Reading Śivadharmottara 12 with Yuko Yokochi A bull attending Tenjin (天神・天満大自在天神) in Kyoto, Japan; a possible Śaivism link in Japan On 12 and 13 December 2022, we held a workshop at L’Orientale, Naples, dedicated to reading the final chapter, chapter 12, of the Śivadharmottara. We used an edition prepared by…
On October 13th and 14th, L’Orientale University in Naples hosted the conference “Śaiva-Buddhist Encounters in Early Medieval East India” The two-day conference well fitted into the scheme of the SAHA Project. It welcomed art historians and archeologists, a curatorial associate, and Indologists working on various aspects of East India,…
We had a workshop in Tokyo on 6–7 August 2022. We discussed identification of places that foreign travellers to South Asia between the 6th and 11th century mentioned as having strong Śaiva presence.
On April 27th and 28th, the University L'Orientale of Naples hosted the conference "Studies on Dharma in the Himalayan Region". We welcomed many scholars and professors from a variety of disciplines, such as philology, jurisprudence, anthropology, and history of South Asia. The aim of the conference was to discuss and…
Two members of our ShivaDharma group, Csaba Kiss and Florinda de Simini, were at Humboldt University in Berlin this week to join the workshop of the ERC DHARMA Project. The workshop "Institutionalised Religion and Asceticism in South and Southeast Asia in the Pre-Modern Period" welcomed many scholars of South and…