Watch 2023-2024 Sessions

Jain Mantras and Theories of Karma

Nov 05, 2024
8:00 - 9:30 AM PST

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Presiding: Christoph Emmrich, University of Toronto

Christoph Emmrich (PhD University of Heidelberg, 2004) engages with fields as diverse as Nepalese and Burmese Buddhism, Sanskrit, Pali, Newar, Burmese and Mon literature and Tamil Jainism. He works with girl children, young women and ritual specialists among the Newars in the Kathmandu Valley (Nepal) and in Yangon, Mandalay, and Mawlamyine (Burma) studying their involvement in Buddhist practices related to marriage, education, monastic ordination and the consecration of images. He confronts the history of their local and academic exegesis and contrasts both with the prescriptive/descriptive literary history of ritual manuals, poetry, and modern novels in Newar, Nepali, Sanskrit, or Burmese, covering the period between the early 17th century and the present, with the personal and ethnographic remembrance of singular religious events. Christoph Emmrich further works on on the historiography of Tamil Digambara Jain literature, temple ritual, and education in North and South Arcot (Tamil Nadu, India). In his work he addresses questions of resemblance and resistance, transfer and translation, mimesis and memory.

Jain Mantras and Theories of Karma
Presenter: Ellen Gough, Emory University

Ellen Gough is an associate professor in the Religion Department at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Her research focuses on Jain ritual, material culture, and narratives. Her book, Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation, was published by Chicago University Press in 2021.

“The Efficacy of Mantra in Vīrasena’s ninth-century Dhavalā”
Each religious tradition that engages with mantras has developed a slightly different understanding of how these utterances work, and Jains have consistently used the language of karma theory to describe the effects of mantras. Looking at Vīrasena's ninth-century Dhavalā provides one Jain understanding of how mantras operate in the universe to affect karmic bondage. His views on this topic will then be examined in the context of various aspects of classical karma theory.
Presenter: Kristi Wiley, University of California, Berkeley

Kristi L. Wiley is retired from the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught Sanskrit and Indic religions in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies. She is the author of the Historical Dictionary of Jainism (the A to Z of Jainism) and a co-editor of Brill’s Encyclopedia of Jainism, along with John E. Cort, Paul Dundas, and Knut A. Jacobsen. Her research has focused on various aspects of karma theory.

“The Efficacy of Mantra in Light of Karmic Bondage”
Each religious tradition that engages with mantras has developed a slightly different understanding of how these utterances work, and Jains have consistently used the language of karma theory to describe the effects of mantras. Looking at Vīrasena's ninth-century Dhavalā provides one Jain understanding of how mantras operate in the universe to affect karmic bondage. His views on this topic will then be examined in the context of various aspects of classical karma theory.