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The Creation and Contestation of Sacred Space
Saturday, February 9, 2008
MANDALA RITUAL
Between February 9th and February 16th, Venerables
Lobsang Gyaltsen and Tenzin Thutop, of Namgyal
Monastery, Ithaca, New York, will visit TCNJ
to perform a sand mandala ceremony. Dating back
more than 3000 years to Buddhist India, mandalas
are diagrams of sacred Buddhist symbols drawn with
colored grains of sand. For the monks who undertake
the ritual, the mandala represents the world in its
divine form, offers a map guiding the mind
toward enlightenment, and depicts the primordial
balance of the energies of the body and the nature of
mind. After the mandala is finished, the monks will
ritually dismantle it, carry the blessed sand particles
to a nearby lake, and cast them into the water. This
final stage, thought to bless the lake, symbolizes the
transience of all life and the Buddhist ideal of nonattachment
to the material world. Each day,
between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., visitors will be able to
observe the mandala’s progress.
9:30-9:45 AM Welcome Remarks
9:45-10:15: Jodi Magness, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, "Sacred Space and Jewish Sectarianism in the Late Second Temple Period."
10:15-10:45: Maria Subtelny, University of Toronto, “Templificatio hominis: Man as Sacred Space in the Islamic Mystical Tradition”
10:45-11 am: Coffee/Tea Break
11:00-11:30: Zeff Bjerken, The College of Charleston, “The Mandala and the Creation of New Buddhist Sacred Space in Tibet”
11:30-12:00: General Panel Discussion
12:00-1:15: Luncheon (by invitation)
AFTERNOON SESSION: The Contestation of Sacred Space
1:30-2:00 : Neal Keating, Hamilton College, “Indigenous Territories, Sacred Space, and Global Foreclosure”
2:00-2:30: Catherine Asher, University of Minnesota, “Mosques and Temples in India: Sacred and Contested Spaces”
2:30-2:45: Coffee Break
2:45-3:15: Bernard Haykel, Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, Princeton University, “Sacred Space, Dissent and Authority in Contemporary Saudi Arabia”
3:15-3:45: General Panel Discussion
3:45-4:00: Overall Comments and Concluding Remarks
February 15, 2008: 3-4 p.m.
Question & Answer Session on the Mandala Ritual
hosted by Professor Pierre Le Morvan, Department of Philosophy
and Religion, The College of New Jersey and Venerables
Lobsang Gyaltsen and Tenzin Thutop
Biographical Statements of the Participants of
The Creation and Contestation of Sacred Space
Mandala Participants
Venerable Lobsang Gyaltsen, Namgyal Monastery, Ithaca, New York.
Venerable Lobsang fled to Bhutan with his family in 1959 after the Chinese communist invasion of Tibet. As a child, Venerable Lobsang did not attend school and was taught to read and write at home by his father. At age 14, he became a monk at Sekhar Monastery in Bhutan. In 1979, after 12 years of studies, he joined the Namgyal Monastery in Dharamsala, India, the personal monastery of the Dalai Lama. At Namgyal Monastery he finished his monastic training in memorization and studies in both sutra and tantra in the Buddhist fields of sciences, and in the traditional tantric monastic practices, ritual arts, and performances, such as mandala construction, butter sculpture, ritual dance, and religious chanting. In 1993, Ven. Lobsang received the degree of "Master of Buddhist Sutra and Tantra." In 2003, he joined the Namgyal, Ithaca branch, where he currently resides and teaches classes in Tibetan Buddhism.
Venerable Tenzin Thutop, Namgyal Monastery, Ithaca, New York.
Venerable Thutop was born in India in 1968, and entered the Dalai Lama's personal monastery in Dharamsala when he was 13 years-old. He earned the title of novice monk at 18, and at 27 became fully ordained as a monk and obtained the degree of "Master Of Buddhist Sutra and Tantra." Ven. Thutop has lived at several of the Namgyal Monastery branches, including those at Kushinagar and Bodhgaya, India. He served in the entourage of the Dalai Lama during the Kalachakra teachings in Barcelona, Spain, and Mongolia. Ven. Thutop has participated in exhibitions of the Kalachakra Mandala in Europe, and his interest in comparative religion lead to time spent at a Catholic Monastery in Missouri in 1996. Ven. Thutop arrived at the Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies in Ithaca, NY in May of 1999, where he currently resides and teaches classes in Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan language.
Symposium Speakers
Catherine Asher, Professor, Department of Art History, University of Minnesota.
Dr. Asher is a specialist in Islamic Art and Indian Art from 1200 to the present. She is well known for her work on the architecture of the Mughal dynasty [Architecture of Mughal India, Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2001] as well as on the artistic patronage of their successors and predecessors. She has recently co-authored India before Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Current research includes a study of Hindu, Jain and Muslim patronage particularly in the cities of Delhi and Jaipur. She received her PhD from the University of Minnesota. Dr. Asher just completed a terms as the College Art Association's Vice President for Publications as well as a ten-year term as the Chair of the Committee on Art and Archaeology of the American Institute of Indian Studies.
Zeff Bjerken, Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, College of Charleston.
Dr. Bjerken has been teaching at the College of Charleston since 1999. He earned a B.A. in Religion from Reed College, an M.A. in comparative philosophy of religion from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an M.A. and Ph.D from the Buddhist Studies program in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. He has pursued fieldwork research in the Himalayan regions of North India, Nepal, and Tibet, and lived in monasteries there. His research interests include the history of religions in Tibet, Buddhist historiography, religious syncretism and the formation of political identity in Asia, and the use of critical theory in understanding and explaining religions. He has served as an editorial assistant for Religions of Tibet in Practice (Princeton University Press, 1995) and for The Tibet Journal. He teaches courses on the religions and cultures of India, Tibet, China, and Japan, on the sacred texts of Asia, and on theory and method in the study of religions.
Bernard Haykel, Professor, Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, Princeton University.
Dr. Haykel just began as professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton. A specialist in Islamic law, politics and history, he was a faculty member at New York University since 1998. Haykel is the author of “Revival and Reform in Islam: The Legacy of Muhammad al-Shawkani” (Cambridge University Press, 2003), which is an intellectual biography of al-Shawkani — considered one of the founding fathers of modern Islamic reformism — and an account of a transitional period in Yemeni history. In 2005, Haykel was one of 16 people across the country selected as Carnegie Scholars by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic organization that was launching a major effort to support the study of Islam. He has been studying the Salafi movement from its base in Saudi Arabia and its various strongholds around the world from the 1960s to the present. A graduate of Georgetown University, Haykel earned his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford.
Neal Keating, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Hamilton College.
Dr. Keating joined the Hamilton College faculty in 2003. He earned his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the State University of New York at Albany. In addition to Indigenous religions, Keating’s research interests include political and visual representational practices, the anthropology of consciousness and media, contemporary Native art history, material culture, globalization, Indigenous movements, and decolonization. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in First Nations Territories in Canada, Costa Rica, and the U.S. His recent work focuses on the contemporary history of Native painting, and is being published in 2007 as a book titled “Pictures and Power: Haudenosaunee and Iroquoian Painting, from the Seventeenth Century into the Twenty-First,” forthcoming from the University of Oklahoma Press. Keating is an active curator, producing several significant exhibitions of contemporary and historical Native art. Prior to joining Hamilton, Keating served as associate director and curator of education of the Iroquois Indian Museum, Howes Cave, NY.
Jodi Magness, Professor, Department of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Dr. Magness holds the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism endowed chair at the University of North Caroline. Previously she was Associate/Assistant Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology in the Departments of Classics and Art History at Tufts University. She received her B.A. in Archaeology and History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania. From 1990-92, Dr. Magness was Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Syro-Palestinian Archaeology at Brown University. Her book, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), won the 2003 Biblical Archaeology Society's Award for Best Popular Book in Archaeology in 2001-2002 and was selected as an “Outstanding Academic Book for 2003” by Choice Magazine. Her other books are The Archaeology of the Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003); Debating Qumran: Collected Essays on Its Archaeology (Leuven: Peeters, 2004); Hesed ve-Emet, Studies in Honor of Ernest S. Frerichs (co-edited with S. Gitin; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998); and Jerusalem Ceramic Chronology circa 200-800 C.E. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993).
Maria Subtelny, Professor, Department of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Toronto.
Dr. Subtelny specializes in Central Asian and Iranian language, culture and history of the Timurid period. Her books include: Timurids in Transition: Turko-Persian Politics and Acculturation in Medieval Iran (Brill’s Inner Asian Library, vol. 19. Leiden: Brill, 2007), and Le monde est un jardin: Aspects de l’histoire culturelle de l’Iran medieval (Cahiers de Studia Iranica, 28. Paris: Association pour 1’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2002). Dr. Subtelny was awarded first prize from the Saidi-Sirjani Book Award committee of the International Society for Iranian Studies the latter work. Her current projects include The Role of Merkavah Mysticism in the Development of the Speculative Trend in Islam, and Interpreter of Truth, a monograph on Jalal al-Din Rumi’s hermeneutical technique in his Masnavi-i ma‘navi. She received her PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Languages, Harvard University.
