Death is a site of memory creation in numerous religious cultures. The papers on this panel explore memory cultures and practices that center around the moment of death across traditions, time, and space. They weave the textual and non-textual together, such as the poetic rhetoric and calligraphic styles of dying Zen Buddhist masters or Chinese Buddhist tomb inscriptions on stone memorial structures. Another examines the Hindu Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava practice of remembering the divine by cultivating forgetfulness of self, and hence experiencing divine love at death. In examining textual and contextual practices of memory and forgetfulness, the papers also speak to remembrance beyond death, whether through the testimonies of loved ones, the politics of memorial creation, or the eternal enjoyment of divine love.
What kind of memories does the epitaph of a late Buddhist master preserve? Whose memories are they? To what extent are epitaphs faithful representations of the memories of the deceased? This paper examines the genre of stūpa inscriptions—memorial texts inscribed on the exterior of typically monumental stone structures (stūpa or ta) that contain the relics of a late monk or nun—through the lens of memory construction. Focusing on the stūpa inscriptions of Buddhist monastics from fourteenth-century China, this paper explores the processes by which religious memory was negotiated, crafted, and promoted in both immaterial and material terms, as it was first committed to paper and then transposed to stone. Stūpa inscriptions preserve a combination of collective and individual memories, transmitted in writing through the concerted efforts of disciples, friends, and donors within the circles of the deceased, sometimes decades after the stūpa was built.
“Deathbed verses” in the Chan or Zen Buddhist tradition are deliberate acts of composing poetry, performed by a master in preparation for their imminent passing. They reflect a ceremonial and intentional engagement with mortality. Deathbed verses have been traditionally understood as sacred expressions of enlightenment or transcendent spontaneity. This paper shifts attention to their calligraphic medium, and explores how visual, sensory, and temporal dimensions materialize as embodied traces within dying’s liminality. I focus on three final calligraphies by a seventeenth-century Chinese Ōbaku Zen master in Japan—brushed in his last three days. I analyze divergences in poetic rhetoric and stylistic features, and examine them alongside the master’s earlier calligraphies and disciples’ account of his final moments. Combining art historical analysis with sensory religion approaches, this paper demonstrates how intentional dying is both performed and memorialized through brush traces of the dying master.
The sixteenth-century Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition presents a model of religious practice that entails multivalent forgetfulness of oneself. The Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition is centrally concerned with a practitioner’s successful cultivation of a loving relationship with the supreme Godhead Kṛṣṇa. Initial devotional practices hinge on a central paradigm of remembering and forgetting: one must strive to remember Kṛṣṇa at all times to the degree that one ultimately “forgets” one’s own ordinary identity as an embodied being (jīva). Ultimately, a practitioner is said to realize their eternal relationship with Kṛṣṇa by awakening to one of four potential "flavors" of devotional love that correspond to Kṛṣṇa's paradigmatic Bhāgavata Purāṇa servants, male friends, parental elders, and erotic beloveds. And yet even such realization hinges on a modality of "forgetting." Even perfected devotees remain so consumed with love for Kṛṣṇa that they forget themselves, presenting a model of devotional forgetfulness that allows realization of eternal self.