"Transplanting Buddhism on the Korean Peninsula"

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Robert E. Buswell, Jr. (UCLA)


The Korean peninsula was one of the last stops on the eastward dissemination of Buddhism from India, to central Asia, to China. But the Buddhism of Korea was no mere derivative of these antecedent traditions. Because Koreans used literary Chinese as the lingua franca of learned communication (much as Latin was used in medieval Europe), Buddhists on the Korean peninsula were in close contact with their educated colleagues across East Asia (and beyond) throughout much of the premodern era and they made seminal contributions themselves to Buddhist thought, practice, and ritual. This lecture will explore how a region in the far hinterlands of northeast Asia was able to forge these connections with their brethren across the continent, bring that dharma home to the peninsula, and ultimately make Buddhism its own.


Evans-Wentz Lectureship 2014-15