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China Humanities Seminar: The Poetry Demon - Tensions Within Chinese Buddhist Monks' Literature
The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies presents a talk by Jason Protass, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University.
When:
February 27, 2017 4:00pm to 6:00pm
Where
Speaker: Jason Protass is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. He completed doctoral work at Stanford University in 2016, and was a visiting researcher at Academia Sinica in Taipei and at Hanazono and Ryukoku universities in Kyoto.
Buddhist monks in Song dynasty China were visited by a literary impulse that interrupted religious activities and ritual. This unwelcome muse was sometimes referred to as the demon of poetry. In this talk, I explore some lesser-known intersections of Chinese poetry and the Buddhist path. I read monks’ verse together with prescriptive texts that restricted literary activity, including legal codes, primers, and hagiography. I hypothesize that at the heart of monastic verse culture was the negotiation of competing commitments to Buddhist monasticism and to literary expression.
Cost:
Free and Open to the Public
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