Carmen Meinert

The workshop addresses cases of religious interactions between Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Buddhism in the Iranian plateau, the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, and China to the end of the first millennium CE. The participants to the workshop investigate formative dynamics of contacts, interactions, and exchanges that took place between Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Buddhism at multiple levels: knowledge, ritual, material, and experiential. The workshop considers the literary and social negotiations Manichaeism carried with Zoroastrianism, as an imperially-mandated religion, in the Sasanian Empire, between the third and the seventh centuries. To this, it adds the perspective of religious interactions across central Asia and into China, to the end of the first millennium CE. The workshop participants will examine the various ways along which Manichaeism moved eastward, out of the Sasanian Empire, and transformed itself in contact with Buddhism. In analyzing the ways in which religions were imported, adopted and transformed in Western and Central Asia, the 2018 workshop regards transformation, hybridization, and adaptation as various outcomes of religious encounters. To discuss these formative interactions of religions on the move, the organizers invited scholars to investigate primary sources in Middle Persian, Parthian, Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Sogdian, Uyghur, and Chinese, which describe religious contacts across Western and Central Asia until the end of the first millennium CE.

The panel focuses on religion and the senses. If Tantric ritual in general is renowned for its direct engagement with the senses, Tibet's religious traditions are the most uncompromisingly Tantric in all of Asia. It is therefore unsurprising that Tibetan religion has developed numerous and complex methods of engagement with the senses, which it understands as one of its primary soteriological methods, and an important aspect of Tibet's vast ritual repertoire. So far, very little work has been done to connect the exterior visible manifestations of ritual with the doctrinal and philosophical views underpinning it. This panel aims to broaden discussion of this topic.