This omnibus panel brings together promising scholarship by PhD students and postdoctoral scholars in the field of Buddhist Studies. This year's presentations demonstrate a striking range of methodological approaches and expertise in terms of region and historical period. Presenters will address Buddhist internationalism between Japan and Burma; the succession crisis at Labrang Monastery that brought institutional transformation instead of decline; Buddhist views of religious war in the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra; and modern adaptations of Yamāntaka ritual texts.
The coming together of a Pan-Asian religious infrastructure and the emerging consciousness of being “Buddhist” gave rise to a what I am calling “Buddhist internationalism,” a form of anti-imperial worldmaking in the late 19th and early 20th century. The focus of this paper, I approach Buddhist internationalism through two conferences held in Burma in 1954, the Sixth Council and Third General Council of the World Federation of Buddhists. By exploring accounts in Burmese and Japanese periodicals, my focus is on the delegation sent to Burma by the Japanese Buddhist Federation, an initiative of heritage diplomacy that gave way to a more radical act of internationalism through the creation of the North-South Buddhist Exchange. The members of this exchange eventually built the World Peace Pagoda in Kyushu in the late 1950s, a symbol of Buddhist solidarity that, I argue, challenges many of our prevailing cold war narratives.
This paper argues that succession crises within Tibetan Buddhist reincarnation lineages could become catalysts for institutional transformation rather than moments of decline. Focusing on Labrang Monastery in Amdo, a frontier region linking Tibetan, Mongolian, Chinese, and Muslim communities, it examines the crisis that followed the death of the First Jamyang Shepa. Disputes over the recognition of his reincarnation, combined with institutional constraints and tensions with regional political authorities, threatened the stability of one of the most influential Gelug monasteries in Inner Asia. Drawing on Tibetan, Chinese, and Mongolian primary sources—including biographies, correspondence, and newly available archival materials—the study analyzes how the Second Jamyang Shepa consolidated legitimacy, reconciled rival factions, and reorganized Labrang’s religious and administrative structures while cultivating new patronage networks with regional leaders, the Ganden Phodrang government, and the Qing court. The paper highlights the interdependence between religious leadership, monastic institutions, and political authority in Inner Asian history.
The relationship between Buddhism and war has long been a topic of research, yet most scholarship has focused on human-centered warfare. This paper examines an exemplary war narrative in Buddhist literature: the god–Asura war described in the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra. The text adapts a pan-Indian myth into a distinctly Buddhist reflection on violence, morality, and cosmic order. Drawing primarily on Abhidharmic cosmological literature, the authors/compilers of the Sūtra reinterpret the bellicose Asuras, demonic rivals of the gods, within a framework of recurring cosmic struggle. Meanwhile, the narrative incorporates moral instruction through the “sixteen human norms,” using this moral framework to justify the violence and victory. Rather than functioning as a political allegory, the god–Asura war narrative reflects broader Buddhist concerns with existential anxiety and moral conduct. Thereby, this narrative presents a Buddhist imagination of “religious war,” where cosmic conflict becomes a vehicle for ethical instruction and cosmological reflection.
Tibetan Buddhist rituals invoking the wrathful deity Yamāntaka are aimed at dispelling both internal and external obstacles. A specific cycle called the Ultra Repelling Blazing Razor, based on the writings of 17th-century Drikung master Rigdzin Chökyi Drakpa (1595–1659), is commonly narrated as secret and dangerous, yet is now available to practitioners worldwide through online media. This paper argues that the ritual’s internal structure, divided into protective and destructive components, provides a mechanism for adapting to a changing landscape of practice, while reserving the most austere elements for adept practitioners. Drawing on textual analysis, digital ethnography, and in-person fieldwork in Lumbini, Nepal, this paper examines the future of Yamāntaka practice through three lenses: shifting discourses of secrecy in the digital age, dystopian narratives of temporal decline embedded in the practice itself, and the material continuity that connects each performance to past and future iterations.