复旦文史讲堂（140）

讲座题目：Mahosadha’s Cunning and the Cretan Labyrinth“大药”的狡黠和克里特的迷宫

演讲者：Dr. Lilian Handlin 

讲座时间：2019年4月4日14：00-16：00

讲座地点：复旦大学光华楼西主楼2801

主持人：刘震 复旦大学文史研究院研究员

讲座语言：英语

讲座内容简介：

One of the Buddha Gotama’s numerous epithets was opamma kusalo muni – sage skilled in parables, exemplified in his life as  Mahosadha.  The remains of an  early second millennium  Burmese kingdom, named after its ceremonial center, Pagan, preserve several visual narratives of the story. They incorporate a labyrinth image  to represent the setting where medicine curing human ailments was dispensed, and   riddles and judicial problems  were resolved –  antecedent of the Bodhimanda – site of Gotama’s Awakening.  Sometime in the late 11th century an unknown artisan,  guided by a learned though anonymous  Buddhist  monk,  selected the labyrinth image to reference his society’s  conception of the human predicament. That monk’s vastly better known Christian counterparts, a millennium earlier and in another part of the world,  chose likewise. The lecture speculates on the reasons and significance of the monk’s  choice in the Pagan context.   

演讲者简介：

Lilian Handlin is a historian. She received her doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she taught until 1977.  She is the author  and co author of several books, including  the  four volume Liberty in America, 1600 to the Present  ( New York, 1986 – 1995)  as well as articles and reviews  in American history. More recently, she began to publish articles concerned with  Myanmar’s early history, grounded in the material culture surviving the kingdom of Pagan.  One of her publications compares two Pagan era narratives of the Vessantara  with its first Burmese  vernacular version composed by an influential 18th century Burmese monk and commentator.  The article was published in  Steven Collins, ed., Readings in the Vessantara Jataka ( New York, Columbia University Press, 2016). An examination of the  myth of the Buddha’s eye teeth, in the Pagan context, appeared this summer in Cristophe Munier Gaillard, ed., Mural Art, Studies on Paintings in Asia (Bangkok 2018).