In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

The key development in the history of logic in India is the formulation and application of the trirupahetu, or the three forms of a (logical) reason. The Tarkasastra (Ru Shi Lun T1633) adopts the trirupahetu to distinguish good arguments from bad arguments (T1633 31b11 ff.).

The Tarkasastra (Ru Shi Lun), as we have it, comprises three chapters. The first chapter is an extended debate pertaining to the claim that there are truths. The second chapter enumerates and critically discusses 16 fallacies (jati). The third lists and explains 22 situations in which a participant in a debate is deemed to have lost (nigrahasthana). The paper critically assesses the text's treatment of five fallacies: the first, the second and the fourth, where the text applies the trirupahetu; and the fifth and sixth, where the text discusses two arguments typically associated with Nagarjuna (3rd century ce).

The famed Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna appears to talk in contradictions, denying both that some P is the case and that it is not the case. Both ancient and contemporary interpretations fall in two camps: (1) let the contradiction stand dialethically or (2) qualify Nāgārjuna's negata to escape a contradiction. I offer a third interpretation, drawing on parallels to Brouwer's (1881-1966) intuitionism. To put it succinctly: no qualification is needed, but because Nāgārjuna is in the business of denying without assertion, he also escapes contradiction.

To build my case of interpreting Nāgārjuna in this vain, I focus on his Vigrahavyāvartanī, namely verses 28-29 and their commentary. I give a philosophical defense of my interpretation following Arend Heyting's (1898-1980) intuitionistic logic, which allows for the weak denial of both P and ~P without contradiction. I argue that both Nāgārjuna and the intuitionist advance cases where neither P nor ~P is provable.

Buddhist logicians from Dignāga onward require that a valid logical reason satisfy three modes (trairūpya): (1) the reason holds of the subject; (2) it is present wherever the probandum is present (anvaya); (3) it is absent wherever the probandum is absent (vyatireka). In first-order logic, modes (2) and (3) — ∀x(Hx → Sx) and ∀x(¬Sx → ¬Hx) — are contrapositives, i.e., logically equivalent. Yet Buddhist logicians unanimously insist both are necessary. I call this the “Trairūpya Puzzle.” After examining Oetke’s epistemic solution and Dharmakīrti’s treatment of the equivalence, I argue that the puzzle exposes a genuine limit of extensional formalization. Drawing on Dharmottara’s niyamavat doctrine and Durvekamiśra’s concept of svagata dharma — intrinsic capacities of the reason itself — I conclude that the second and third modes encode intensional content that the material conditional of first-order logic cannot capture. The trairūpya is a presentation of phenomenological relation. 

This paper reexamines the origin and ritual character of the Wuzhe Assembly (Ch. wuzhe hui 無遮會), a large-scale Buddhist religious gathering described by the Chinese monk Xuanzang at the court of King Harṣavardhana. Since the nineteenth century, scholars have generally identified the Wuzhe Assembly with the pañcavārṣika (“Five-Year Assembly”). Building on recent philological research, this paper argues instead that the term more likely reflects the Sanskrit nirargaḍamedha, a ritual concept associated with unrestricted generosity and large-scale ceremonial giving that may ultimately derive from the Brahmanical sarvamedha (“universal sacrifice”). By reassessing textual and historical evidence from Indian and Chinese sources, the paper shows how this ritual idea was transformed within Buddhist contexts into large public religious gatherings combining royal patronage, merit-making, and communal participation. The study thus highlights how ritual concepts and forms of religious celebration were transmitted and reinterpreted as Buddhism moved from India to China.

This paper discusses early images depicting Siddhartha as a young prince during his First Meditation, along with epigraphical records attesting to this image cult. Additionally, several passages from the Vinayas of the Sarvāstivādins and Mūlasarvāstivādins preserved in Classical Chinese also document the now largely forgotten image worship of the Bodhisattva Siddhartha and shed light on the cult and iconographic significance of the First Meditation image, helping explain its transregional popularity. These materials demonstrate that the “jambu tree shadow image” once stood at the center of an important monastic cult and formed part of festivals and image processions associated with the major Buddhist festival celebrating Śākyamuni’s Enlightenment, known as the “Great Festival.” The paper also considers the connection between this cult and the emergence of the “Pensive Crown Prince” (Ch. siwei taizi) image, likely originating in Northern India and Gandhāra and later popular across China and East Asia.

Mañju Pañcamī (Śrī Pañcamī) is a major cultural and religious festival of the Kathmandu Valley that commemorates the arrival of Mañjuśrī from China’s sacred Mount Wutai. Celebrated on the fifth day of the waxing moon in Māgha (January–February), the festival venerates Mañjuśrī—revered as the prince of Buddhist Dharma as well as Sarasvatī, the Hindu goddess of learning. This study examines the festival’s syncretic character, in which Buddhist and Hindu traditions converge in shared devotion to wisdom and speech. It also explores associated practices, including ritual bathing at Taudaha Lake for scholarship and prosperity, and the widespread belief that this auspicious day permits life‑cycle ceremonies without astrological consultation. A central rite initiates children into education by guiding them to write “Namo Vāgīśvarāya.” As a nationally observed festival, Mañju Pañcamī integrates religious veneration with educational and social rites of passage, reflecting the Kathmandu Valley’s long-standing cultural harmony.

This paper reexamines the origin and ritual character of the Wuzhe Assembly (Ch. wuzhe hui 無遮會), a large-scale Buddhist religious gathering described by the Chinese monk Xuanzang at the court of King Harṣavardhana. Since the nineteenth century, scholars have generally identified the Wuzhe Assembly with the pañcavārṣika (“Five-Year Assembly”). Building on recent philological research, this paper argues instead that the term more likely reflects the Sanskrit nirargaḍamedha, a ritual concept associated with unrestricted generosity and large-scale ceremonial giving that may ultimately derive from the Brahmanical sarvamedha (“universal sacrifice”). By reassessing textual and historical evidence from Indian and Chinese sources, the paper shows how this ritual idea was transformed within Buddhist contexts into large public religious gatherings combining royal patronage, merit-making, and communal participation. The study thus highlights how ritual concepts and forms of religious celebration were transmitted and reinterpreted as Buddhism moved from India to China.

This paper discusses early images depicting Siddhartha as a young prince during his First Meditation, along with epigraphical records attesting to this image cult. Additionally, several passages from the Vinayas of the Sarvāstivādins and Mūlasarvāstivādins preserved in Classical Chinese also document the now largely forgotten image worship of the Bodhisattva Siddhartha and shed light on the cult and iconographic significance of the First Meditation image, helping explain its transregional popularity. These materials demonstrate that the “jambu tree shadow image” once stood at the center of an important monastic cult and formed part of festivals and image processions associated with the major Buddhist festival celebrating Śākyamuni’s Enlightenment, known as the “Great Festival.” The paper also considers the connection between this cult and the emergence of the “Pensive Crown Prince” (Ch. siwei taizi) image, likely originating in Northern India and Gandhāra and later popular across China and East Asia.

Mañju Pañcamī (Śrī Pañcamī) is a major cultural and religious festival of the Kathmandu Valley that commemorates the arrival of Mañjuśrī from China’s sacred Mount Wutai. Celebrated on the fifth day of the waxing moon in Māgha (January–February), the festival venerates Mañjuśrī—revered as the prince of Buddhist Dharma as well as Sarasvatī, the Hindu goddess of learning. This study examines the festival’s syncretic character, in which Buddhist and Hindu traditions converge in shared devotion to wisdom and speech. It also explores associated practices, including ritual bathing at Taudaha Lake for scholarship and prosperity, and the widespread belief that this auspicious day permits life‑cycle ceremonies without astrological consultation. A central rite initiates children into education by guiding them to write “Namo Vāgīśvarāya.” As a nationally observed festival, Mañju Pañcamī integrates religious veneration with educational and social rites of passage, reflecting the Kathmandu Valley’s long-standing cultural harmony.

In late imperial China, while permanent vegetarianism was often criticized, periodic fasting gained widespread state and social acceptance. Central to this practice were widely circulated fasting calendars, which mapped sacred dates to encourage ritual purity, accumulate merit, and foster divine connections. This presentation explores the construction, circulation, and reception of knowledge concerning "divine time." Focusing on the representative Yuxiaji (玉匣記) and analyzing editions from 1684 to 1891, the study reveals how a shared repertoire of fasting days was created, transcending strict regional and confessional divides. Furthermore, by juxtaposing these prescriptive texts with descriptive historical sources from Suzhou—a major publishing and religious hub—this research demonstrates how fasting calendars were actively employed in daily practice, ultimately shedding light on the sanctification of everyday life and the temporal experience of spirituality.

Much scholarship on Chinese bronze mirrors emphasizes their Daoist associations. This paper highlights two overlooked cases that situate mirrors instead within the broader shushu數術 repertoire. The first concerns two ninth-century mirrors inscribed with a hemerological diagram used to select auspicious departure dates, a method widely attested in Chinese and Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts. Their portability suggests that mirrors functioned as practical tools for managing travel risk. The second case, preserved in Tang poems and later ritual descriptions, involves a domestic divination in which a woman listens for chance speech after orienting herself through a spinning ladle in water; the square stove, round pot, and rotating ladle cosmologically map Earth, Heaven, and the Dipper. Together, these cases show the multivalence of mirror use beyond Daoism. They also reveal the gendered distribution of travel ritual, linking mobility, divination, and household practice in Tang China.

Through an analysis of the online circulation of short videos produced by Chinese lay Buddhists featuring their temple visits, this paper explores how such audio-visual artifacts mediate religious experiences and serve as a reflexive process in (re)constructing the interplay between religious traditions and ethical experiences. I focus on videos posted on one of China’s biggest social networking platforms, RedNote, which is especially popular for sharing tips on travel, makeup and fashion, to examine how lay Buddhist videos circulated in a media environment, where mass culture, consumer culture, and religious traditions interact with each other, reconstruct the concepts of religious experience, authenticity, and legitimacy. I also situate these videos within the context of the revival of Buddhism in reform-era China to see how they, embodying the renewed interest in traditional Buddhist self-cultivation, reveal the nexus of personhood construction and the social project of moral cultivation in contemporary China. 

This paper extends current scholarly discussions of embodiment and healing in religious studies to the domain of material objects. By analyzing a corpus of medieval Chinese narratives that foreground the vulnerability and pain of Buddhist statues, the paper redefines disability not as a marker of alterity but as a vulnerable phase of existence shared by both sentient beings and Buddhist icons. The analysis further demonstrates that religious agents in medieval China often occupied simultaneous roles as caregivers and care-receivers, allowing healing to emerge through reciprocal relationships. This paper also shows that medieval Chinese monks employed Buddhist narratives to transform the material vulnerability of Buddhist images into sites of compassion and doctrinal reflection, thereby highlighting the significance of Buddhist literature beyond being mere didactic tools or records of social memory.

How do memories leave their traces on the land? And how does the landscape in turn render memories legible? This paper examines the emergence of the legend of the “Nodding Stones,” a hagiographic episode in the famous 4-5th century monk Zhu Daosheng’s biography, in which his sermons are so powerful that even rocks bow in assent. Although now firmly associated with Daosheng’s activity in Tiger Hill, Suzhou, the episode is absent from early biographies of him. Through a close reading of local gazetteers, Tang poetry, and sectarian biographies, I propose a new trajectory for the legend’s development from earlier materials to its later mature form. This paper shows that sacred geography is not a passive backdrop of narrative, and texts and spaces co-produce one another over time. Religious memory endures not simply through repetition in writing, but through its capacity to become anchored in place.

This paper examines the entanglement of labour, class, and religion among migrant workers in Gurgaon, North India. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it invokes the Hindi term majboori (compulsion or necessity) as a key idiom through which workers interpret their precarious conditions. Migrants locate their hardships in the worldly order rather than divine will. This moral landscape is inseparable from Gurgaon's religious and class geography, where an ostensibly secular urbanism naturalises Hindu middle-class religiosity while rendering other working-class identities suspect. Engaging Shankar Ramaswami's Souls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant Workers in Contemporary India, the paper argues that majboori provides a framework through which migrants interpret labour precarity while sustaining dignity. It does so within a city that simultaneously depends on their labour yet excludes them from its moral community.

Addressing the unit’s special emphasis on religion and labor in South Asia, this paper will analyze an important, though implicit, connection between two main threads of Shankar Ramaswami’s Souls in the Kalyug: on the one hand, the close relationships between Delhi metal polishers and their machines, and on the other, divine presences in the factory and even within the machines themselves. As this paper will show, the resulting “god–man–machine” imbrication bears important implications not only for how the workers see themselves, their machines, and their gods, but also more broadly as a corrective to posthumanist frameworks which ignore or deny the crucial roles of the divine. This paper will thus contend that Ramaswami’s analysis, through its attention to the dynamic interactions among metal workers, their machines, and deities, pushes posthumanists to consider how the divine works alongside and in concert with technology in humans’ quest to be “more-than-human.” 

This paper presentation will examine ritual practice as a form of labor by tracing Kamala's claim, an oracle of Kodungallur Bhagavathy in the southern Indian state of Kerala, that ritual possession is a toḻil (an occupation). Using a recurring weekly ritual at her personal shrine as an analytic thread, the paper studies how ritual possession, livelihood, and ethical life are co-constitutive. By situating her claim within the social and political histories of Izhava caste assertions of dignity, the presentation examines how work becomes an operative category for oracles both through its assertion and refusal. It analyzes the choreography and improvisation of this ritual across shrines, foregrounding ritual possession as a form of embodied labor co-authored with the Goddess.  

Speaking of “futures” instead of “the future” foregrounds the fact that no singular future is guaranteed. In recent storytelling, two futures are particularly common: the techno-optimist, which envisions the triumph of capitalist innovation, and the climate dystopian, which envisions the inability of capitalism to contain its ecologically destructive powers. Both futures extrapolate features of the current “business-as-usual” order to one or another logical conclusion. This paper explores an alternative narrative found in several recent novels. These novels, including Eiren Caffall’s All the Water in the World (2025), Susanna Kwan’s Awake in the Floating City (2025), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017), are set in cities that are now at least partially submerged by rising seas. While the waters wash away much of what the cities have been, they also make new forms of life possible. This paper explores the way these novels thematize water – and, with it, the uncontrollable power of a changing climate – as both destructive and potentially liberative. 

This paper presents climate fiction as an essential pedagogical tool for envisioning more sustainable and just ecological futures, drawing upon the “The Camille Stories” by Donna J. Haraway as one example (2016). Haraway’s fiction depicts human and more-than-human ongoingness in the face of destruction and despair – challenging readers to resist nihilism and build resilient communities even without the guarantee of success. Beyond analyzing the theory and method of climate fiction, this paper focuses on the benefits of asking students to write their own fictional pieces. Fiction writing challenges students to envision the futures they actually want to sustain: the people, places, and values that are worth their collective effort to protect. Writing fiction also allows students to productively grapple with the possibilities and limits of their own ecological agency. This paper will conclude with practical activities and writing prompts that instructors can integrate within their own courses.  

This project (re)imagines Asian American ecofeminist theology through planetary entanglements, offering a decolonizing, relational, and future-oriented response to ecological collapse, climate crisis, and pandemic precarity. Drawing on Judith Butler’s phenomenology of vulnerability and Catherine Keller’s panentheistic ecotheology, it situates ethical and theological reflection within the interdependence of human and more-than-human life. Central to both method and message are two Korean concepts: salim (살림), “enlivening” or "sustaining life", and jeong (정), "relational affectivity and "care". These concepts function as metaphor and ethical lens, showing how contextual, everyday ecofeminist practices—acts of care, repair, and co-flourishing—embody hope for planetary futures while enacting a decolonizing ethic that resists hierarchical and instrumental logics. Salim and jeong provide frameworks for (re)imagining ecological and social interdependence, situating hope as one of many therapeutic-paths within broader ecotheology. The study advances a decolonial theology of Hope, envisioning a new Earth/us co-created through care, relational integrity, and transformative planetary engagement.

My paper examines how Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes)—Amanda Strong’s stop-motion film—visualizes sacred landscapes and Indigenous futures through its portrayal of Biidaaban, Sabe, ancestors, and multispecies kin reclaiming maple-sugaring practices within a suburban neighborhood. Drawing on Indigenous visual sovereignty, sensory film analysis, and decolonial theories of land-relation in dialogue with religion and ecology, the paper reflects on the film’s textures, contrasts of light, and spatial layering to show how cinematic form becomes a mode of ceremony and ecological imagination. Strong’s film reveals a sacred geography that persists against erasure, rendering land not as backdrop but as a living network of ancestral presence and multispecies relationality. Its aesthetic strategies display the interweaving of past and present and how future sacred geographies emerge through acts of care and multispecies belonging. Ultimately, this paper interprets Biidaaban as a visual, ceremonial practice of ecological homemaking—an Indigenous futurity that refuses erasure.