A new Web site.

For those who have visited us before, you will notice a marked change in our Web site, including a new Calendar page for upcoming events and courses, and a nascent Resources page that we hope will grow with time into a helpful source of information for scholars. Please browse around and let us know how you like the site and what we can do to improve it. You can send your comments to our new Web master, Ari Borrell, at borrell@rescomp.stanford.edu.

The year in review.

The past year has been a busy one for SCBS. In October, we opened our new quarters in Building 70 on the Main Quad, where we are neighbors of the Department of Religious Studies. The suite of three rooms provides us with offices for our staff, housing for our reference collection, and a seminar and reading room that has quickly become a popular study cum social space with our students.

Also in the autumn we innaugurated what we hope will be an annual student colloquium, in which graduate students present talks on their current research. The winter term saw a steady stream of visiting speakers for our annual Buddhist Studies Seminar Lectures, which this year focused on the theme "Buddhist Economies: Material and Symbolic". In the spring we held the first of our SCBS international conferences, on the topic "Buddhist Priests, Kings, and Marginals"; the papers of the conference, presented by some fifteen scholars from Japan and the US, will be published as a volume in Asian Religions and Cultures, a new series we have developed with the Stanford University Press. We will be describing the series soon on these pages.

Meanwhile, we were happy to have Linda Hess back as a center fellow and visiting professor of Religious Studies, where she taught Indian religions. Stephan Bokenkamp, of Indiana University, joined us for winter and spring terms as a fellow and visiting professor of Religious Studies, teaching courses on Taoism and Chinese religions; and in the spring Hashimoto Eijû, of Komazawa University, began a one-year stay as a visiting researcher, for study of Zen texts.

The year ahead.

Looking to the coming year, we start with two conferences in October that take us from ancient India to modern Japan. The first is "Early Indian Religions: Interactions", an Evans-Wentz conference organized by center fellow Linda Hess; the second, "Sôtô Zen", focuses on the history of Japan's largest Zen Buddhist denomination. Between these two conferences we will host a public symposium of scholars and religious leaders on the theme "Dogen Zen and Its Relevance for Our Time". We are honored that SCBS was chosen as the site for this symposium, sponsored by the Sôtô Zen school as one in a series of events in celebration of the 800th anniversary of the birth of its founder, Dôgen (1200-1253).

Throughout the winter and spring terms we will offer two lecture series: one on "Tibetan Buddhism"; the other on "Buddhist Ritual and Iconography". Our Evans-Wentz lecture this year will be given in the winter term by Prof. Paul Harrison, of Canterbury, a distinguished scholar of early Mahayana texts. In the spring term SCBS will join with Stanford's Continuing Studies Program to present a one-day retreat on "The Buddhist Experience". This event, which is part of our outreach program, will offer public talks and free discussions on various themes in the Buddhist religion, from philosophy and meditation to art and politics.

This year Prof. Angelica Cedzich, of Depaul University will be a fellow of the center while she teaches courses on Chinese religions as visiting professor of Religious Studies. She will be joined in the spring by Prof. Ishii Seijun, of Komazawa University, a specialist on the texts of Dôgen, who will be at the center for a one-year stay. Less happily, the center's faculty committee will lose the services of Prof. Susan Matisoff, who is moving from Stanford to nearby UC-Berkeley to take up the post of chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures there; Susan has been a rich resource for our students of Japanese, and while we wish her well we warn her that we will continue to look to her for guidance from across the Bay in the years ahead.

As we look to the years ahead, we are delighted to report that Prof. Gregory Schopen, of UCLA, will be joining the faculty of Religious Studies and the executive committee of SCBS. A specialist on the history of Indian Buddhism, he will bring to Stanford much-needed expertise in South Asian studies and will greatly broaden our coverage of the Buddhist tradition. Prof. Schopen will take up his duties in the autumn of 2000 and is already planning an SCBS conference on the origins of the Mahayana Buddhist movement.

Finally, we can report that during the coming year SCBS will be launching a new initiative in the study of the religions of Asia. To be called "Asian Religions & Cultures" (ARC), the initiative will seek to expand the study of Asian religions across the boundaries between academic disciplines and the lines between academic concerns and public interest. Thus ARC will sponsor a wide range of programs, from scholarly research to public events and performances, that we hope will appeal to a broad constituency both in the university and the community. This is a bold departure for SCBS, still in the planning stages, and we will need much help from our friends to bring it to fulfillment. Please do lend us your support and let us know your ideas on this and other activities of our center.

Carl Bielefeldt
Bernard Faure

News of the site.

Previous visitors may notice that we have added an e-mail contact form on our home page. Now that it is so easy, please let us hear from you and add you to our mailing list. We have also added pages describing our new ARC initiative and put up the papers from last autumn's "Dogen Zen Symposium" in our Resources folder. New resources now in the works: a mirror site for downloadable Mojikyo Chinese fonts, and the first translations of the Soto Zen Text Project.

The year to date.

The ARC (Asian Religions & Cultures) initiative got off to a fast start this autumn with a $200,000 grant from the university President's Fund; the funds will be used to mount several conferences and other public events over the next four years. Our first ARC conference was held in October: "Early Indian Religions: Interactions", organized by SCBS fellow Linda Hess and co-sponsored by Religious Studies.

Also in October, we hosted two events sponsored by the Soto Zen school of Japan: the "Dogen Zen Symposium", and a conference on "Soto Zen". The two-day symposium, organized by center fellow Mark Gonnerman, was attended by over 350 visitors from Japan, Europe, and North America. Our thanks to the Soto school, to Mark, and to all who helped to make this historic event possible. We also wish to express our gratitude to the Soto school for their donation, on the occasion of the symposium, of works on Soto to our center library.

Coming up.

In the months ahead, we have a full schedule of visitors, for four lecture series, on Indian religions, Tibetan Buddhism, the Silk Road, and our annual SCBS colloquium, this year on Japanese Buddhist Ritual and Iconography. In April, Paul Harrison, of Canterbury, will deliver the annual Evans-Wentz Lecture. Then we will be at Green Gulch farm, in Marin County, for a day of lectures on "The Buddhist Experience", a public event cosponsored with Stanford's Continuing Studies Program; and back at Stanford to host the annual Vesak festival, organized by the Buddhist Council of Northern California.

People.

Congratulations to Irene Lin, our long-time program coordinator, who has been appointed assistant director of SCBS. Cheers also for two new doctors of Religious Studies: Max Moerman, for a dissertation on Mount Kumano in medieval Japan; and Mark Berkson, for a dissertation on death in early Chinese thought. Max has an appointment at Barnard; Mark has just taken up a post at Hamline.

Keeping up.

We hope this little directors' news page will become a ongoing feature of our site, updated at the start of each academic term. Back numbers will be stored in our Archive folder.

Carl Bielefeldt
Bernard Faure

The past term.

The center saw a steady stream of visitors during the winter term, for lecture series on Indian religions, Tibetan Buddhism, the Silk Road, and Japanese Buddhist Ritual and Iconography. Meanwhile, the Stanford Channel was showing a Sunday night series of rebroadcasts of our October symposium Dogen Zen and Its Relevance for Our Time, the papers of which can be found on this site.

Coming up this spring.

The spring term opens with our annual Evans-Wentz lecture, cosponsored with the Department of Religious Studies; the speaker this year will be Prof. Paul Harrison, of Canterbury, discussing the earliest Indian sources for the Buddhist tradition of the paradise of Sukhavati. Then the center will be offering a day-long program of lectures at Green Gulch farm, in Marin County, on "The Buddhist Experience"; happily for us, but unhappily for many others, this event, co-sponsored with Stanford's Continuing Studies Program and limited to one hundred participants, already has a long waiting list. Also coming up in April: lectures by Neil McMullin, of Toronto, on Japanese Buddhism; Anne Klein, of Rice, on Tibetan Bon; Dale Wright, of Occidental, on Buddhism; and Vidya Dehijia, of the Freer and Sackler Galleries, on Hindu art.

People.

In the spring term, the center will welcome Prof. Ishii Seijun, of Komazawa, to a one-year tenure as visiting fellow; Prof. Ishii will be conducting research on the Japanese Zen figure Dogen and will be leading an SCBS reading group on Dogen's Eihei koroku.

Congratulations to our newest Buddhist studies graduate, Michael Como, of William and Mary, for his dissertation "Silla Immigrants and the Early Shotoku cult: Ritual and the Poetics of Power in Early Yamato"; to Wendi Adamek ('97), currently of Iowa, who will be joining fellow program graduate Max Moerman ('00) on the faculty at Barnard; to Mark Unno ('94), who is moving from Carleton to the University of Oregon; and to Hank Glassman, who is taking a post at the Institute for Buddhist Studies in Berkeley while continuing as a doctoral fellow of the center.

Congratulations also to Buddhist studies doctoral students Lisa Grumbach and Irene Lin for completion of their examinations; Lisa will be doing a dissertation on hunting rituals at the Japanese Suwa Taisha temple complex; Irene will be writing on images of the child in medieval Japanese Buddhism.

And finally, a welcome to new doctoral students Yang Zhaohua, who will be joining us to work on medieval Chinese Buddhism; and George Clonos, who will be studying Shugendo.

Carl Bielefeldt
Bernard Faure