TALK> Emanuela Garatti, "Mythical and Historical Discrepancies: Chinese Princess Wencheng and the Princess of Jincheng as Presented in Old and Classical Tibetan and Chinese Sources" (Zoom)

Lewis Doney Discussion

Dear colleagues, 

We on the BuddhistRoad team (https://buddhistroad.ceres.rub.de/en/) are happy to be offering our third hybrid guest lecture, both on site in the Center for Religious Studies (CERES) Bochum and live worldwide via Zoom online. 

The guest lecture will be presented by Emanuela Garatti of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Centre de recherche sur les civilisations de l'Asie orientale, Paris, on the 22nd of April 2021 at 14:00–15:45 Central European Summer Time (UTC+2). Emanuela Garatti’s talk is titled: 

Mythical and Historical Discrepancies: Chinese Princess Wencheng and the Princess of Jincheng as Presented in Old and Classical Tibetan and Chinese Sources

In Tibetan classical sources, the two Chinese princesses arrived in Tibet during the 7th and the 8th centuries are consistently presented as having played critical roles in introducing and promoting Buddhism in Tibet. These sources, dating as early as the 11th and the 12th centuries, provide an image of two the princesses as active patrons of Buddhism and thus perpetuate an image of two women incarnating the role of legitimisers of Buddhism’s presence in Tibet up to the present. Nevertheless, old Tibetan sources, in particular Dunhuang Tibetan documents and Chinese sources, official histories as well as other official texts, never mention the proclivity of Princess Wencheng and Princess of Jincheng towards Buddhism nor detail any specific religious activities of the two princesses. This presentation surveys references to the two princesses in early Tibetan and Chinese sources in order to go beyond this fundamental discrepancy between ancient and classical sources and to understand the continuities and divergences lying behind these texts. The goal of this presentation is also to provide the evolution of the image of Princess Wencheng and Princess of Jincheng in Tibetan and Chinese historiography.

The lecture is available live at Zoom. Please pre-register at: https://ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYofuqrrDIvG9bgynYXiTkp8BFmLNir8mY_ (note the underscore at the end that needs to be included) by 12pm on the 20th of April 2021. For more information, please see: https://ceres.rub.de/en/events/mystical-and-historcial-discrepancies-chinese-prin/

Best wishes,
Lewis Doney

BuddhistRoad,
Ruhr-Universität Bochum
lewis.doney@rub.de