Kameyama Lecture: James Benn on Tea

UBC Kameyama Lecture Series on Buddhist Studies Proudly Presents Professor James Benn of McMaster University for the following talk:

“Buddhist Episodes from the Prehistory of Tea in China”

• Date: Thursday, October 7 , 2010
• Time: 4:00 – 5:30 PM
• Location: Asian Center 604

James A. Benn (PhD, UCLA 2001) is Associate Professor of Buddhism and East Asian Religions at McMaster University.  He studies Buddhism and Taoism in medieval China.  To date, he has focused on three major areas of research: bodily practice in Chinese Religions; the ways in which people create and transmit new religious practices and doctrines; and the religious dimensions of commodity culture.  He has published on self-immolation, spontaneous human combustion, Buddhist apocryphal scriptures, and tea and alcohol in medieval China.  He is the author of Burning for the Buddha: Self-immolation in Chinese Buddhism (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007) and is currently completing a second book, Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History.