This event is hybrid. However you choose to attend, please use the Zoom Registration button to register. In person attendees will be asked to follow all current UBC pandemic health guidelines in response to COVID 19.
Asian Studies Room #604 – 1871 West Mall, Vancouver, BC | V6T 1Z2
The atelier is that of the Newar Buddhist priest, scholar, raconteur, translator, and print pioneer Niṣṭhānanda Bajrācārya, operating in 1914 Kathmandu. The canon is crafted out of what the Newar Buddhist literature has to offer for a translation of these sources into modern literary Newar. The narrative is the Buddha’s life story.
Drawing on materials from his own atelier, Christoph Emmrich will lead the group through Niṣṭhānanda’s translation and expansion of the Lalitavistara, keeping a close eye to some of its Sanskrit sources. This guided tour will focus on the transitional in Niṣṭhānanda’s text, directing the participants’ attention to shifts between speech and script, print and manuscript, translation and commentary, as well as between Sanskrit and both Classical and Modern Newar.
Christoph Emmrich (Ph.D. University of Heidelberg, 2004) is Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto. He engages with fields as diverse as Nepalese and Burmese Buddhism, Sanskrit, Pali, Newar, Burmese and Mon literature, and Tamil Jainism. He works with ritual specialists, girl children, and young women among the Newars in the Kathmandu Valley (Nepal) and in Yangon, Mandalay, and Mawlamyine (Burma) studying their involvement in Buddhist and Hindu practices related to marriage, coming-of-age, gender, childhood, and the writing of ritual. He has worked on canonical Theravāda and Śvetāmbara Jain doctrines of time, as well as on the history of Jain literature and religious institutions in North and South Arcot, Tamil Nadu. In his work, he addresses questions of resemblance and resistance, transfer and translation, mimesis and memory, institution and event. His latest book Writing Rites for Newar Girls: Marriage and Menarche in Kathmandu Valley Ritual Manuals is forthcoming with Brill. Currently, he is leading a team, located at the University of Toronto, the University of Virginia, and in Kathmandu, that is compiling the Newar Online Dictionary (NOD), the first academic electronic meta-dictionary of classical and modern Newar.