Jason Neelis
Jason Neelis studies religious traditions of South Asia in historical, economic, and material contexts, with an emphasis on issues related to processes of cross-cultural mobility and exchange. In Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks (Brill, Leiden: forthcoming 2010), he examines patterns in the institutional expansion of Buddhist communities based on literary texts and manuscripts, inscriptions and petroglyphs, and archaeological sources. He has contributed articles and chapters on ancient routes through the Karakorum mountains, Central Asian migrations to South Asia, and geographical and historical backgrounds for avadāna narratives in Gandharan Buddhist manuscripts to the Bulletin of the Asia Institute, On the Cusp of an Era, and Buddhist Studies. His teaching interests extend broadly to dynamic interactions between South Asian religions (including Hinduism and Jainism), transregional connections and movements across Asia via overland and maritime networks, and the role of cultural and religious catalysts in the past and present.
Phone: 519-884-0710, ext. 4572
Address: Department of Religion and Culture
Wilfrid Laurier University
75 University Ave. West
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5
Canada
Phone: 519-884-0710, ext. 4572
Address: Department of Religion and Culture
Wilfrid Laurier University
75 University Ave. West
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5
Canada
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Books by Jason Neelis
Open Access: http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/books/9789004194588
Papers by Jason Neelis
Open Access: http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/books/9789004194588
This presentation focuses on Buddhist narratives in the art of Gandhara, where hagiographical scenes from Śākyamuni Buddha’s lifetime are more commonly depicted in distinctive sculptures in the early centuries AD. However, a relatively small but nevertheless valuable corpus of about a dozen jātakas can be identified in approximately 150 Gandharan sculptures in South Asian and other museum collections and archives.
Within only the last twenty years, significant collections of early Buddhist manuscript fragments written on birch bark and palm leaves from the geographical, chronological and cultural contexts of ancient Gandhara and Bamiyan have become available for scholarly study. The recently discovered manuscripts written in the Kharoṣṭhī script and Gāndhārī language have opened new vistas on very early stages in the literary transmission of Buddhist genres, including abbreviated summaries of narratives labeled as Pūrvayogas and Avadānas, which overlap to some extent with Jātaka stories of the Buddha’s previous births.
Based on initial results of a survey of Gandhāran Jātaka images in Indian museums carried out by collaborators in a project funded by the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation for Buddhist Studies and ongoing work on editions of Gāndhārī Avadānas and Pūrvayogas in the British Library collection with Timothy Lenz, I aim to address differences in the uneven distribution, classification of narratives, and principles of selection of stories for representation in visual and written media by regional ateliers of Gandharan artists and individual scribes. What might have made these stories appealing to regional audiences of lay and monastic patrons, how narratives were localized in the religious landscape of the northwestern frontiers far away from the Magadhan homeland of the Buddhist tradition, and the ways in which the visual imagery and written versions facilitated transcultural processes of Buddhist expansion within and beyond Gandhara, Bamiyan, and Bactria will be guiding questions.
(saddharma) in ex eventu eschatologies (Hiltbeitel 2011; Nattier 1991). Contemporary Saka (Gandhari Sago) figures are favorably depicted in abbreviated versions of Avadanas and Purvayogas concerned with themes of the True Dharma’s disappearance
preserved in Kharosthi manuscripts from the first century CE in the British Library collection (Lenz 2003, 2010; Salomon 1999, 2007). This presentation focuses on an Indo-Iranian character named Yola Arutega who is anachronistically linked to
Ajatasatru and four well-known Mahasravaka followers of the Buddha in an Avadana. An assessment of Saka roles in
fragmentary narratives preserved in early Buddhist manuscripts leads to reconsideration of stereotypes of exogenous “others” as threats to Dharma in Buddhist and non-Buddhist eschatologies.
Does the title of –svāminī refer to their position as wives or daughters of male vihārasvāmins?
Did these female lay monastic officials fulfill administrative roles by mediating between monastic communities and lay society?
What was the relationship between female vihārasvāminīs and monks and nuns inhabiting these monasteries? [relations between monks and nuns (monastic sangha) receive considerable attention, as do symbiotic exchanges between lay and monastic communities, but links between lay female donors and monks or nuns who received their donations deserve further exploration. Perhaps another way of asking this question is, “what must it have been like for male or female renouncers to live in monasteries administered by female (as opposed to male) vihārasvāminīs?”]
By holding this title, were they simply acknowledged as chief patronesses (as female counterparts to male ‘masters’ of monasteries), or, as Prof. Schopen provocatively argues based on donative formulae in Indian Buddhist inscriptions and references to male vihārasvāmins in the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya, were they actually owners of monasteries with obligations for their maintenance? If this was the case, how was it possible to donate a monastery or to a monastery yet still remain responsible for what was given away? Such an ongoing relationship would not seem to conform to general concepts of gift giving and property exchange in South Asian Dharmaśāstra traditions.
Although I can not adequately answer all of these questions based on the limited epigraphic data at my disposal (my search was not exhaustive, and I have not yet attempted to find vihārasvāminīs in literary sources), I hope that this presentation of selected examples of vihārasvāminīs in Indian Buddhist inscriptions may generate suggestions for additional sources to explore, help to refine these inquiries beyond levels of preliminary speculation, and lead to discussions of possible connections between other types of female patrons and Buddhist nuns.