Inner Asian and Uralic
National Resource Center

I am a specialist in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, and my work to date has focused broadly on Buddhism in India as practiced during the first millennium. I am interested in the ways in which doctrines inform, and are informed by, practices—more specifically, in questions of how protocols for teaching, learning, and interpreting Buddhist texts have shifted over time as these protocols have themselves been taught, learned, and interpreted.

My work draws its methods and concerns from at least three distinct academic disciplines: history, philosophy, and philology. It is historical, insofar as it does not attempt to provide an encompassing account of what a de-historicized “Buddhist tradition” says. Rather, it focuses more narrowly on particular times and places, to the extent that this is possible, and aims to offer a descriptive account of the normative assumptions that were influential in those times and places. My work is also philosophical, insofar as it rationally reconstructs these normative assumptions to show the ways in which they have provided—and can continue to provide—resources for sustained reflection on some of the guiding questions of philosophy. Finally, my work is philological, insofar as it excavates these assumptions via close inspection of primary sources in Sanskrit and Classical Tibetan, attending to the ways that processes of textual transmission in pre-print culture can serve to shape received texts.

My recent and current projects include studies of: guides designed to provide instruction for would-be commentators on how best to articulate the meaning of scriptural texts; the rhetoric of Buddhist letters to Indian kings; divergent traditional accounts of the so-called “four reliances”; the extent to which one can reasonably speak of a “commentarial mindset” informing the composition of Buddhist exegetical works in India; conspiratorial offenses in the Pali vinaya and norms for assessing culpability of participants in cases of theft and killing; the philosophical issues raised by Indian discussions of how and why Buddhas are to be made materially present via the plastic arts.

Awards

• Trustee’s Teaching Award, Indiana University Department of Religious Studies
• Luce Dissertation Fellowship, Divinity School, University of Chicago
• Individual Research Grant, Committee on Southern Asian Studies, University of Chicago
• Summer Language Fellowship, University of Virginia