Professor Natalie Gummer (Beloit College) will lead a workshop on Buddhist metaphors for emptiness across several Buddhist texts in multiple languages.

Monday, June 2, 2025
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM (Pacific Time)
Royce Hall 243 (ALC Lounge)
Los Angeles, CA 90095

The Ritual Work of Emptiness Metaphors

 This workshop emerges from my current research into a set of Buddhist metaphors for emptiness found in a wide range of materials, including Pāli suttas and Mahāyāna sūtras, as well as various śāstras. I investigate how some such texts employ these metaphors not only to depict the mortal body as empty, but also to enact that emptiness prior to positing and metaphorically generating the perfected body of a buddha. This trajectory recapitulates in ritual-poetic form the dynamics of South Asian sacrificial strategies for attaining an immortal, verbal body. The workshop will briefly introduce this ritual dynamic via passages in the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa-sūtra and the Suvarṇaprabhāsottama-sūtra before engaging participants in reading related passages from other Buddhist materials.

Bio:

Natalie Gummer, Professor of Religious Studies and Critical Identity Studies, holds the Edwin F. Wilde, Jr. Chair at Beloit College. She graduated with a PhD from Harvard University in Buddhist Studies in 2000. Her research examines premodern South Asian Mahāyāna Buddhist ritual and literary culture, especially normative notions of sūtra study and performance as ritual practices. She is editor of The Language of the Sūtras: Essays in Honor of Luis Gómez, and author of numerous articles on the performative aspects of Buddhist literature. She has recently completed a monograph entitled Performing the Buddha’s Body: Sūtras as Ritual Speech Acts.

Texts will be distributed through email ahead of the workshop to all who register

Cost : Free and open to the public but registration required

Sponsor(s): Center for Buddhist Studies, Handa Haruhisa Chair of Shinto Studies