Buddhism among the Khmers
The civilisation of ancient Cambodia produced an extraordinary corpus of inscriptions in Sanskrit and Old Khmer, of which more than one and a half thousand examples survive (more continue to be occasionally discovered). Several of the Sanskrit inscriptions stand out as remarkable specimens of epigraphical poetry, rivaling for learnedness and richness of style the best examples of such poetry produced on the South Asian sub-continent. The corpus also provides important evidence for the history of Śaivism, Vaiṣṇavism, and Buddhism. The lecture will discuss some Buddhist inscriptions in Sanskrit, as well as recent scholarly work on such inscriptions, make new proposals for the reading of the text in some cases, and for its interpretation in others, and will attempt both to survey the state-of-the-art regarding this field of research and the desiderata for its future progress.
Speaker
Harunaga Isaacson is Professor of Classical Indology at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He studied philosophy and Indology at the University of Groningen (MA 1990), and was awarded a PhD in Sanskrit by the University of Leiden (1995). From fall 1995 to summer 2000 he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Oriental Institute, Oxford University. After holding teaching positions at Hamburg University and the University of Pennsylvania, he was appointed Professor of Classical Indology in the Department of Indian and Tibetan Studies, Asien-Afrika-Institut, Hamburg University, in 2006. The main areas that he studies are: tantric traditions in pre-13th century South Asia, especially Vajrayāna Buddhism; classical Sanskrit poetry; classical Indian philosophy; and the Sanskrit inscriptions of Cambodia.
Registration
Please register by 23 May 2025 at office.ikga(at)oeaw.ac.at if you wish to attend the lecture.
To participate online, register here: https://oeaw-ac-at.zoom.us/meeting/register/PAr1MOghTgi6ExyVQ6YD2A. You will then receive access information by e-mail.