The collaboration on a Buddhist Studies lecture series—between the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and Naropa University—got off to a wonderful start on Thursday, October 17th. Janet Gyatso from Harvard University spent the day visiting both institutions and interacting with faculty and students. There were two main events: a luncheon hosted by Naropa for graduate students in Religious Studies from both institutions and a public lecture hosted by CU Boulder on "Ways of Knowing the Body in Buddhist Tantra and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Medicine."
The luncheon at Naropa provided the occasion for a candid conversation between Janet Gyatso and graduate students in Religious Studies about the ethics of scholarship as it pertains to the question of secrecy in tantra. The conversation also touched on the salient issue, raised by scholars such as Robert Orsi and Russell McCutcheon, concerning approaches to the study of religion as an "insider" or "outsider" to the tradition in question.
In her lecture that evening on the CU Boulder campus, Janet Gyatso discussed the challenges articulated by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ medical doctors in mapping the channels and cakras of the subtle body, as depicted in tantric sources, onto the empirical body observed through autopsy. That this felt like a necessary project to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ doctors historically, many of whom were Buddhist monks engaged in esoteric practices, is itself interesting in addition to the various interpretations offered by key figures in medical writings from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.
The public lecture drew nearly 100 faculty and students from academic institutions along the Front Range—CU Boulder, Naropa, CU Denver, and Denver University—as well as members of the Boulder community with diverse interests in tantra, ayurveda, yoga, and meditation.
This event was sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies in conjunction with Naropa University.
