In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper explores Śivasvāmin’s 9th century Sanskrit poem, the Kapphiṇābhyudaya (The Rise of Kapphiṇa), as a case study in novel literary representations of the Buddha generated through Hindu-Buddhist literary encounters in Kashmir. Specifically, it investigates how the poet’s uptake of a specific poetic structure, a description of a mountain, is used to aid his telling of an avadāna narrative in a courtly poetic (mahākāvya) form. It argues that the poem’s description of the mountain creates an extended comparison between the mountain and the Buddha through the literary devices of pun (śleṣa) and suggestion (dhvani). Thus, what appears to be merely the fulfillment of a generic staple of the courtly poetic genre, is in fact an opportunity to explore the nature of Buddhahood and devotion to the Buddha. Overall, this paper illustrates how literary innovations in early medieval Kashmir produced strikingly new representations of the Buddha in Sanskrit poetry.  

Newar Buddhism, a unique tradition in Nepal, has remained a living tradition while Buddhism in  other parts of South Asia declined after the 15th century. This paper examines the survival of Newar  Buddhism, with a focus on the financial support and patronage it received through donation  inscriptions from the Malla era (1201–1779). The key questions explored are: Who were the  patrons of Newar Buddhism in terms of caste and occupation? How were resources allocated? And  how did Nepal’s patronage system differ from other part of South Asia? 

I argue that, alongside royal patronage, the continuous donations from ordinary lay Buddhists were  vital to the survival of Newar Buddhism. By analyzing medieval patronage patterns, this study sheds light on Newar Buddhism’s creative strategies for sustaining community support. It  contributes to the broader understanding of Buddhist economics, religious sustainability, and the  dynamic interactions between Buddhism and surrounding religious traditions in South Asia.

This paper examines how Mount Jizu in Dali, incorporated into the Ming empire’s southwestern frontier in 1371, came to be identified with the Indian mountain Kukkuṭapāda, where the Buddha’s disciple Mahākāśyapa is believed to guard Śākyamuni’s robe while awaiting the future Buddha Maitreya. I argue that local elites, Ming state, and Chinese Buddhists collectively produced a new frontier sacred site. Dali elites sought to enhance ethnic prestige by linking their homeland to the sacred geography of Indian Buddhism, while the Ming state promoted Buddhist institutions as part of its broader effort to culturally integrate the southwestern frontier. At the same time, identifying Mount Jizu with Kukkuṭapāda allowed Chinese Buddhists to address a longstanding “borderland complex” arising from Buddhism’s Indian origins by situating the residence of the first Chan patriarch Mahākāśyapa within Ming territory. The case demonstrates how frontier regions could generate new sacred geographies that reshaped the wider Buddhist world.

This paper examines a purported “borderland Buddhism” along Tibet’s Mangyul Gungtang corridor, a trans-Himalayan conduit for trade, transportation, and religious exchange between Tibet and South Asia since the seventh century. Focusing on the hermitage of Drakar Taso and its nineteenth-century abbot Chokyi Wangchuk (1775–1837), the paper develops the concept of the “frontier lama”—a religious exemplar whose authority and institutional practice are constituted through work from the margins rather than proximity to centers of power. Drawing on Chokyi Wangchuk’s extensive writings, and engaging scholarship on medieval European frontier monasticism, the paper argues that the frontier lama’s defining features—border mobility, stewardship of endangered lineages, and synthesis of doctrinal traditions—represent a coherent pattern of Tibetan religious activity in the southern borderlands. It further contends that the borderlands functioned not as passive periphery but as an active site for the formation, preservation, and transmission of religious culture.

This paper looks at two emerging projects in the American Muslim community: Muslim Futures by Utopia Studios and Muslim Futurism by MIPSTERZ. These two projects have complementary approaches to imagining Muslim futures in the US, and potentially globally, that engage various art forms. The author, as a participant observer in both projects, examines the approaches of each to explore the divergences between them to understand the Muslim communities each imagines. In this investigation, one cannot avoid the theological thinking underlying both groups, either implicitly or explicitly. As such, the projects are about the future of US Muslims, and also of Islamic and Religious Studies. The self-conceptualization of these groups is an invitation to reconsider the categories and approaches we use in the study of Muslims.

Through its newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, the Nation of Islam articulated a vision of Black Muslim futurity grounded in self-determination and scientific progress. This paper considers how Muhammad Speaks presented decolonizing African nations as exemplars for its own dream of an independent nation within America. The newspaper portrayed new African nations as rejecting European influence by “doing for self” and embracing scientific tools to improve health outcomes and increase economic productivity, and it encouraged readers to identify with their progress. As such, these stories were more than news. They offered evidence that Black people were reclaiming their rightful position as the leading civilization on Earth and provided a model for Black people in America to follow as they built their own independent nation. From news about industrialization in Ghana to science fairs at the University of Islam, Muhammad Speaks offered readers a glimpse into the vibrant future Black Muslims were building.

This paper documents the formation of a new Muslim Left in New York City, exploring how members of this movement incorporate Islamic theology and ethics into their political practice. On the heels of electing the city’s first Muslim socialist mayor, Muslim organizers are turning to Islam as a language of resistance against the crises of affordability, capitalist accumulation, and imperialist war. Combining participant observation with in-depth interviews, this project documents how the new Muslim Left is challenging the secular Left’s suspicion of theology through its novel articulation of a progressive political Islam. Across Muslim electoral organizations, cultural institutions, informal study circles, places of worship, and performance spaces, I document how Muslim community leaders, political organizers, and creatives in New York City are forging a contemporary Islamic critique of American capitalism and imperialism.

In Bhartṛhari’s sphoṭa (“flash”) theory, Silence—which I use to render paśyantī, the highest level in the threefold hierarchy of speech—represents the purely non-verbal phase of speech and the point of origin from which articulated speech emerges. Bhartṛhari characterizes this through the metaphor of a peahen’s egg: just as a full, multicolored peacock is implicitly present within the egg’s yolk, the complete sentence and its sequential constituents are held implicitly in Silence as an undifferentiated whole. This paper addresses three interrelated questions addressed in Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya: how Silence can be understood as pure, non-conceptual subjectivity; how it differs from mere ineffability; and how it unfolds in a way that it generates an appearance of the world.

This paper argues that the prominent Chan monk Hongzhi Zhengjue 宏智正覺 (1091–1157) expanded the significance of the term mo 默 (silence) from its more narrow use as a method of meditation practice to signify the very goal of meditation (an enlightened state), and even ultimate reality in his new vision of a Caodong-School path to cultivation. The many meanings Zhengjue ascribed to mo (silence) are clearly articulated in his portrait encomia (zhenzan真贊). This paper first places Zhengjue’s portrait encomia within the contemporary monastic practice of fundraising and literati relations to demonstrate the effect Zhengjue’s literary achievements had on contemporary literati. Subsequently, through close readings of the encomia, the article analyzes how Zhengjue employed the character mo 默 in 94 of his 434 portrait encomia as both a reflection of the path to self-cultivation and a symbol of its ultimate goal.

Within dualistic Yoga and Jainism, mauna (silence) is considered as a form of tapas (austerity) or a supporting practice for non-violence or truthfulness. However, as this paper argues, within non-dualistic systems, silence is not just the conscious restraint of speech, but an ontological state. The c. sixteenth-century Aparokṣānubhūti reframes mauna as one of its fifteen yogic steps on the path to the realization of Advaitic oneness. It defines mauna in the words of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad (2.9.1) as that state “from which words turn back, together with the mind.” According to the Aparokṣānubhūti, silence by merely restraining speech is child’s play and true silence is equated with brahman. The passage preceding the Taittirīya Upaniṣad verse explains that a wise person journeys through the increasingly subtle sheaths of food, breath, mind, wisdom, and bliss. This bliss is brahman—one who knows it is never afraid and transcends dualistic conceptions of silence.

In China, writing arises to divine the divine, to let heaven speak. Yet contra the cosmology of early divination, early philosophy mostly agrees with Confucius (Kongzi): “heaven doesn’t speak.” For Kongzi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Hanfeizi, heaven’s silence is its perfectly effortless efficacy, which we should try to emulate; for Xunzi, it is a silence we should distance ourselves from via ritual, creating worldly order and stability instead. This presentation expounds Mengzi’s speculatively rich middle position, building on Franklin Perkins’ reading. For Mengzi, we should perfect our naturally good and heaven-bestowed, yet thereby ‘unscripted’ (spontaneous, divinely unplanned) dispositions, for want of maximal resilience in the face of everything heaven in complete moral silence enacts, viz., the outrageous caprice of human fates and fortunes. Human self-cultivation thus flips heavenly silence back on itself, achieving heaven’s absolute self-knowing as humanity’s tragic self-consciousness. Our very inability to reconcile with fate is heaven’s "heavening" in silence.

In Bhartṛhari’s sphoṭa (“flash”) theory, Silence—which I use to render paśyantī, the highest level in the threefold hierarchy of speech—represents the purely non-verbal phase of speech and the point of origin from which articulated speech emerges. Bhartṛhari characterizes this through the metaphor of a peahen’s egg: just as a full, multicolored peacock is implicitly present within the egg’s yolk, the complete sentence and its sequential constituents are held implicitly in Silence as an undifferentiated whole. This paper addresses three interrelated questions addressed in Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya: how Silence can be understood as pure, non-conceptual subjectivity; how it differs from mere ineffability; and how it unfolds in a way that it generates an appearance of the world.

This paper argues that the prominent Chan monk Hongzhi Zhengjue 宏智正覺 (1091–1157) expanded the significance of the term mo 默 (silence) from its more narrow use as a method of meditation practice to signify the very goal of meditation (an enlightened state), and even ultimate reality in his new vision of a Caodong-School path to cultivation. The many meanings Zhengjue ascribed to mo (silence) are clearly articulated in his portrait encomia (zhenzan真贊). This paper first places Zhengjue’s portrait encomia within the contemporary monastic practice of fundraising and literati relations to demonstrate the effect Zhengjue’s literary achievements had on contemporary literati. Subsequently, through close readings of the encomia, the article analyzes how Zhengjue employed the character mo 默 in 94 of his 434 portrait encomia as both a reflection of the path to self-cultivation and a symbol of its ultimate goal.

Within dualistic Yoga and Jainism, mauna (silence) is considered as a form of tapas (austerity) or a supporting practice for non-violence or truthfulness. However, as this paper argues, within non-dualistic systems, silence is not just the conscious restraint of speech, but an ontological state. The c. sixteenth-century Aparokṣānubhūti reframes mauna as one of its fifteen yogic steps on the path to the realization of Advaitic oneness. It defines mauna in the words of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad (2.9.1) as that state “from which words turn back, together with the mind.” According to the Aparokṣānubhūti, silence by merely restraining speech is child’s play and true silence is equated with brahman. The passage preceding the Taittirīya Upaniṣad verse explains that a wise person journeys through the increasingly subtle sheaths of food, breath, mind, wisdom, and bliss. This bliss is brahman—one who knows it is never afraid and transcends dualistic conceptions of silence.

In China, writing arises to divine the divine, to let heaven speak. Yet contra the cosmology of early divination, early philosophy mostly agrees with Confucius (Kongzi): “heaven doesn’t speak.” For Kongzi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Hanfeizi, heaven’s silence is its perfectly effortless efficacy, which we should try to emulate; for Xunzi, it is a silence we should distance ourselves from via ritual, creating worldly order and stability instead. This presentation expounds Mengzi’s speculatively rich middle position, building on Franklin Perkins’ reading. For Mengzi, we should perfect our naturally good and heaven-bestowed, yet thereby ‘unscripted’ (spontaneous, divinely unplanned) dispositions, for want of maximal resilience in the face of everything heaven in complete moral silence enacts, viz., the outrageous caprice of human fates and fortunes. Human self-cultivation thus flips heavenly silence back on itself, achieving heaven’s absolute self-knowing as humanity’s tragic self-consciousness. Our very inability to reconcile with fate is heaven’s "heavening" in silence.