Is there a \"Dharma of History?
Workshop organized at Leiden University, May 29-31, 2006
by Alexander L. Mayer (University of Illinois), Axel Schneider (Leiden University)
Funded by the Chung-Hwa Institute for Buddhist Studies (Taipeh), the International Institute for Asian Studies (Leiden), the NWO, the KNAW, and the CNWS
The workshop on the question "Is There a Dharma of History" conducted at the University of Leiden was attended by scholars from Japan, Taiwan, Germany, Netherlands, and the United States. The workshop raised the question as to what extent and in what sense it is reasonable to argue that Buddhism was a major ingredient in the making of the historiographical and/or historiological thought of seminal early modern Chinese and Japanese thinkers.
Major intellectual figures discussed included Taixu, Ouyang Jingwu, Nishitani Keiji, Mou Zongsan, Tanabe Hajime, et al. Besides papers that addressed the issue from the point of view and within the work of individual thinkers other papers discussed the problematic from a Buddhological, Buddhist, or Buddho-historical point of view. While it was only partly anticipatable whether and how the individual papers would enrich the depth and scope of the discussion, it turned out that all papers did in their own respective ways contribute to the unfolding discussion. All papers evinced a high level of scholarly research and accordingly were capable of triggering fruitful discussions that were conducted in an amicable but serious spririt of examining the questions raised. The fact that the scope of the workshop was limited in terms of numbers of participants greatly facilitated the intensity of the discussions.
The papers and the discussions all contributed to the clarification of the core issue, namely how the Buddhist Dharma has and is contributing to our understanding what it means to be "in history". It became clear that while Buddhism is in fact not supporting an anti-historical position, it at the same time would not support a position that takes the meaning of history for granted and would uphold that the historicity of the historical contingent realities would be exhausted by their historicity. The papers presented all showed that Buddhism was considered to be most amenable to a "modern" understanding of history. We find that early modern thinkers all assumed that the Buddhist teachings of impermanence and temporality in themselves already contained the seeds to a modern position regarding history and the question of the historicity of human existence. Irrespective of whether East Asian thinkers would co-opt a more Kantian, a more Hegelian, or a more Heideggerian position, there was a shared sense that Buddhism would support the notion that man is marked by his historicity, that modern man has only now been fully confronted with his own historicity, and that history is the name for this stage on which man has to play out the nature of his being that can be seen in his historicity.
The notion of a Dharma of History proved itself to be fruitful in that it did not offer anything like a linear concept that could be easily appropriated and assimilated to individual positions but rather served a a touch-stone for any suggested answer regarding the question of the challenge to modern man regarding his becoming and its nature in face of the ever more complex integration and co-existence of several originally separate cultural projects. While it was not disputable that the Dharma of History would on a first level of inquiry be limited to the historical space of the cultures within which Buddhism had actually played a major role in framing the scope of the historical discourses on history, at the same time it also suggested itself as a notion rich in association connecting historico-cultural spaces not historically belonging to the Buddhist cultural sphere.
One of the major outcomes of the workshop are - next to the publication of selected contributions - plans for a follow-up conference to be organized at Leiden University in May/June 2007 on The Writing of History in 20th Century East Asia: Between Linear Time and the Reproduction of National Consciousness organized by scholars from Chicago University, Leiden University, and Australian National University (workshop description attached).
Participants of the "Is there a Dharma of History?" workshop and their contributions
Brook, Timothy (University of British Columbia, Vancouver): Time and Suffering in Buddhist Pasts and Presents
Heisig, James (Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, Nagoya): The Dharma of Historical Progress
Huang Yi-hsun (Chung-Hwa Institute for Buddhist Studies, Taipeh): Song literatus Wang Sui's Buddhist Historical View
Lin Chen-kuo (National Taiwan Cheng-chi University): Echoes of Melancholy in Emptiness: Heidegger, Nishitani Keiji, and Mou Zongsan on Nihilism, Metaphysics, and History
Maraldo, John (University of North Florida, Jacksonville): Methodology of the search for a "Dharma of History"
Mayer, Alexander (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): Dharma of History: The Buddhist Premise in Contemporary Chinese Thought on History
Mueller-Saini, Gotelind (University of Heidelberg): Buddhism and Modernity in Early 20th Century China: The Case of Ouyang Jingwu and Taixu
Murthy, Viren (Chicago University): Zhang Taiyan's Buddhist Response to Evolutionary Thinking and its relation to History
Schneider, Axel (Leiden University): Liang Qichao's changing views of history -- evidence for Buddhist influence?
Conference on
The Writing of History in 20th Century East Asia:
Between Linear Time and the Reproduction of National Consciousness
Organizers:
Chris Goto-Jones, Leiden University
Rikki Kersten, Australian National University
Viren Murthy, University of Chicago
Axel Schneider, Leiden University
Since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chinese, Japanese and Korean intellectuals have thought about their traditions in new ways under the influence of the categories and disciplinary divisions prevalent in Western Universities. This conference will focus on how intellectuals expressed and theorized this change by negotiating indigenous concepts of temporal continuity with larger narratives of history. It is evident that under some description, scholars in East Asia have been writing histories since ancient times, often making reference to formative texts from their shared intellectual traditions such as the Book of History (Shiji) and the Twenty Four Histories (er shi si shi). However, the term for history (shi - China and Japan) undergoes a transformation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and hence famous intellectuals such as Liang Qichao (in China) and Fukuzawa Yukichi (in Japan) can claim that there were no real histories written during the pre-modern period. These changes are of course partly made possible by a transformation of educational systems and, in particular, by the abolition of the imperial system of examinations (in China) and the creation of a modern university system (in Japan).
This new intellectual and institutional context would make even residual practices of figuring the past take on new meanings. Given this complex interaction and mutual imbrication of traditional practices, new conceptions of time and history and various conceptions of how to imagine China's, Japan's or Korea's place in the regional order and their place in the world more widely, there were of course many different interpretations of how to write history in 20th century East Asia. Some of these historical practices adopted elements of different competing ideological structures, such as linear time, historical teleology and national consciousness and others that resisted such ideologies while trying to rescue aspects of the tradition to imagine new political ideals. Moreover, despite, or even because of radical changes in political forms, East Asian intellectuals across the region have constantly returned to the problem of history throughout the 20th century and the various participants in this conference will examine the implications of the production of history during different periods of 20th century East Asia, from the late Qing (China) or Bakumatsu (Japan), through Imperial Japan, communist China, and even to the present day.
Participants:
Arif Dirlik, University of Oregon, adirlik@oregon.uoregon.edu
Hon Tze-ki, State University of New York at Geneseo, hon@pop.geneseo.edu
Viren Murthy, University of Chicago, mviren2002@yahoo.com
Brian Moloughney, University of Otago, brian.moloughney@stonebow.otago.ac.nz
Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, University of Vienna, susanne.weigelin-schwiedrzik@univie.ac.at
Sebastian Conrad, Free University of Berlin, sconrad@zedat.fu-berlin.de
Chris Lorenz, Free University of Amsterdam, cfg.lorenz@let.vu.nl
Wang Fansen, Institute for History and Philology, fanshen@pluto.ihp.sinica.edu.tw
Peng Minghui, National Taiwan Cheng-chi University, pangmf@nccu.edu.tw
Liu Longxin, Soochow University, Taipeh, ophelia@mail.scu.edu.tw
Luo Zhitian, Beijing University, zhitianluo@sohu.com
Wang Hui, Qinghua University wanghui1010@yahoo.com.cn
Naoki Sakai, Cornell University, ns32@cornell.edu
Lee Haiyan, University of Colorodo at Boulder Haiyan.Lee@colorado.edu
Takahiro Nakajima, Tokyo University tnt1103@nifty.com
Thomas Saul, University of Chicago stthomas@uchicago.edu
Qiao Zhihang, Waseda University qiaojdy@yahoo.co.jp
Chris Goto-Jones, Leiden University, C.Goto-Jones@let.leidenuniv.nl (already in Leiden)
Stefan Tanaka, UC Berkeley, stanaka@ucsd.edu
Rikki Kersten, ANU, Rikki.Kersten@anu.edu.au
Moishe Postone, University of Chicago, m-postone@uchicago.edu
Axel Schneider, Leiden University, a.schneider@let.leidenuniv.nl
Richard Calichman, City College of New York, rcalichman@hotmail.com