Published by The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford
Education
Religion & Spirituality
Buddhism
The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford podcast features faculty, graduate students, visiting speakers, and alumni in conversation with Miles Osgood and Leah Chase on the history, philosophy, and practice of Buddhism. Interviews are intended to be both academic and accessible: topics range from scholarly publications and insights to personal journeys and reflections. Interview videos are posted on YouTube, @thehocenterforbuddhiststudies. For more information about our events, speakers, and research, visit buddhiststudies.stanford.edu.
Rafal Felbur talks about Chinese and Tibetan texts that preserve Indic sources lost in Sanskrit, the early Chinese exegetes who imposed a restrictive orthodoxy even while compiling their inclusive Buddhist canon, and the digital tools that can help us triangulate the content of original scriptures from these enduring translations. Interview by Miles Osgood. Part 1 of 2. Part 2 of this interview will be published on September 1.
Oriane Lavolé talks about the history of treasure revealers ( tertöns ) from 11th-century Tibet to contemporary Nepal, how apologists for the treasure tradition ( terma ) have responded to skeptics who dismiss its material foundations, and what site guides to sacred territories can teach Western Buddhists about the ecological roots of the religion. Interview by Miles Osgood.
At the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah, California, we talk to professors, monastics, and laypeople about the acquisition of the historic property and the 600-mile bowing pilgrimage that inaugurated it, the transformative relationship between monasticism and education, and the importance of community as the City continues to evolve and expand. Interview by Leah Chase The music in this episode is by Rev. Heng Sure. "Bow Down, Turn Around" and "It's Called the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas," recorded in 2025 and 2007, respectively, are distributed by Dharma Radio Music. Additional music is by Blue Dot Sessions.
Christian Luczanits talks about the eccentricities of early Buddhist art in the Mustang region of the Himalayas, the intellectual exchange that ran through the region long before its 15th-century kingdom, and the importance of documenting the manuscripts and sculptures of mountain monasteries in situ. Interview by Miles Osgood.
Chiew Hui Ho talks about parasutraic texts in medieval China that chronicle devotion to specific sūtras, how these histories give us a picture of “Buddhism on the ground” distinct from that of miracle tales, and how scriptures like the Diamond Sūtra and Lotus Sūtra thereby develop lives and biographies of their own. Interview by Miles Osgood.
Joshua Capitanio talks about his graduate work on medieval Chinese Buddho-Daoism, how translation projects and “second book” arguments are valued inside and outside the professoriate, and what it takes to make a career transition to the university library. Interview by Miles Osgood.
Meir Shahar talks about the cult worship of the “Ox King” and the “Horse King” in China. Working at the intersection of scriptural studies and field research, Shahar connects the two animal gods back to Sākyamuni and Avalokiteśvara through locally transmitted manuscripts and their Indic sources, and he describes the unorthodox Buddhist priests in Guizhou Province who perform rituals for draft animals using these textual manuals. Kings of Oxen and Horses: Draft Animals, Buddhism, and Chinese Rural Religion (Columbia University Press, 2025). Interview by Miles Osgood. Talk from April 11, 2024 at HCBSS: Meir Shahar, “Buddhism and Chinese Rural Religion.” https://buddhiststudies.stanford.edu/events/meir-shahar-buddhism-and-chinese-rural-religion
Adeana McNicholl talks about the misunderstood realm of the “ pretas ,” typically translated as the home of “hungry ghosts” but in fact host to an entire history of the ancestral “departed.” Following Indic " preta " narratives from their Brahmanical ritual origins through the construction of a Buddhist karmic cosmology, McNicholl considers the moral aesthetics of punishments designed to disgust, the gendered appetites of semi-divine seductresses, and the Sanskrit story that puts the whole chronology of " preta " literature back together. Of Ancestors and Ghosts: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2024). Interview by Miles Osgood. Adeana McNicholl, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University, is a scholar of Buddhism in premodern South Asia and in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Her first book, "Of Ancestors and Ghosts" (Oxford University Press, 2024), examines the historical development of the Buddhist "preta," or ghost, through narrative literature, asserting the importance of ghost stories for the creation of cosmological ideas. Her current book project, tentatively titled "Black Buddhism: A Religious History of Afro-Asian Solidarity," illustrates the importance of Buddhism for the conceptualization of Blackness within transnational anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-caste movements. Her other projects include a documentary reader on Black Buddhism, which she is co-editing with Ralph H. Craig III, and the Buddhism and Caste Initiative, co-directed with Nicholas Witkowski.
Gil Fronsdal talks about studying in Buddhist monasteries from Big Sur to Bangkok, founding the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, and creating an integrated Buddhist world culture through the practice of vipassana meditation. Gil Fronsdal is the founding teacher and a co-guiding teacher at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California and the Insight Retreat Center in Santa Cruz, California. He has been teaching since 1990. Gil was ordained as a Soto Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982 and at Theravada monk in Burma in 1985. Gil also has a PhD in Buddhist Studies from Stanford University. Interview by Leah Chase
James Gentry talks about the thousand-year history of the Tibetan maṇi pill, back to its medieval origins in an age of Mongol invasions and epidemics, through an infusion of psychoactive fungi for experimental meditation in the 13th century, and as a shared token for today’s global Tibetan Buddhist diaspora. James Gentry is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford. He specializes in Tibetan Buddhism, with particular focus on the literature and history of its Tantric traditions. He is the author of Power Objects in Tibetan Buddhism: The Life, Writings, and Legacy of Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen , which examines the roles of Tantric material and sensory objects in the lives and institutions of Himalayan Buddhists. Before joining Stanford, James was on the faculty of the University of Virginia. He has also taught at Rangjung Yeshe Institute’s Centre for Buddhist Studies at Kathmandu University, where he served as director of its Master of Arts program in Translation, Textual Interpretation, and Philology. He has also served as editor-in-chief of the project 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha , which aims to commission English translations of the Buddhist sūtras, tantras, and commentaries preserved in Tibetan translation and publish them in an online open-access forum. Interview by Miles Osgood.
Ralph H. Craig III talks about crafting constructive analogies between Christian and Buddhist liturgies, characterizing the ideal preachers ( dharmabhāṇakas ) described in Mahāyāna sūtras, and Tina Turner’s contributions to Buddhist pedagogy. Ralph H. Craig III is an interdisciplinary scholar of religion, whose research focuses on South Asian Buddhism and American Buddhism. He received his B.A. in Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University and his Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Stanford University. His research interests include memoir, race, popular culture, yoga/meditation theory, religious experience and authority. He works with textual materials in Sanskrit, Pāli, Buddhist Chinese and Classical Tibetan. His work has appeared in the journals American Religion, Buddhist-Christian Studies, and the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies; in Lion’s Roar and Tricycle magazines; on the American Academy of Religion’s Reading Religion website; and the 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha. His first book was, Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner (Eerdmans Publishing, 2023), which explores the place of religion in the life and career of Tina Turner and examines her development as a Black Buddhist teacher. His next book project is a monograph on preachers in Mahāyāna Buddhist sūtras. Interview by Miles Osgood.
Allan Ding talks about why the Chan monk Moheyan lost the 8th-century “Samyé Debate” over the future of Tibetan Buddhism, how medieval Chinese Buddhists shifted from “antiritualism” to accepting the “zhāi” feast, and what forms of religious imagination scholars can adopt from liturgical practices. Yi (Allan) Ding received his bachelor's degree from Fudan University (2008) and his PhD in Religious Studies from Stanford University (2020). As a scholar of Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism, he has published several articles that deal with Buddhist materials from Dunhuang and Sino-Tibetan Buddhism, including “‘Translating’ Wutai Shan into Ri bo rtse lnga (‘Five-peak Mountain’): The Inception of a Sino-Tibetan Site in the Mongol-Yuan Era (1206–1368)” (2018), “The Transformation of Poṣadha/Zhai in Early Medieval China (2nd–6th Centuries CE)” (2019), and “By the Power of the Perfection of Wisdom: The ‘Sūtra-Rotation’ Liturgy of the Mahāprajñāpāramitā in Dunhuang” (2019). He is currently working on a book project that focuses on the "zhāi" feast and relevant liturgical scripts from the eighth to the tenth century. In connection to his interest in consumption rituals, he is also working on early Sanskrit and Tibetan materials concerning the practice of the Tantric feast (gaṇacakra). Interview by Miles Osgood.
Marcus Bingenheimer talks about why new tools in the Digital Humanities demand new genres of scholarship, what network analysis reveals about the transmission of religious ideas in medieval China, and how AI’s large language models will help arcane texts reach a new global readership. Marcus Bingenheimer is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Temple University in Philadelphia. He taught Buddhism and Digital Humanities in Taiwan at Dharma Drum (2005 to 2011) and held visiting positions and fellowships at universities in Korea, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, and France. Since 2001 he has supervised various projects concerning the digitization of Buddhist culture. His main research interests are the history and historiography of Buddhism, early sūtra literature, and how to apply computational approaches to research in the Humanities. He has published some sixty peer-reviewed articles and a handful of books . Interview by Miles Osgood.
Julian Butterfield talks about the winding path to a dissertation topic, overcoming exegetical resistance to emotional affect in religious literature, and the central role of joyful anumodanā (隨喜 suixi ) in the Lotus Sūtra . Julian Butterfield holds a BA in Comparative Literature and Religious Studies (2016) and an MA in Religious Studies (2018), both from the University of Toronto, and a PhD from Stanford University (2025). Generally interested in the dissemination and development of Mahāyāna Buddhism in early medieval China, his past research explored the textual history of the "Huayan jing" and the related development of bodhisattva ordination in the "Chinese Pusa yingluo benye jing." Julian’s current research interests include the history of Buddhist drama, especially along the Silk Roads, and the poetics of divine encounter across Mahāyāna literature and ritual. Interview by Miles Osgood.
Pia Brancaccio talks about the Buddhist cave monasteries of Western Deccan, the inter-continental exchange of "Maritime Buddhism" along the "Cotton Road," and the competition between Buddhism and Shaivism at the end of the first millennium C.E. Pia Brancaccio is currently a Professor of Indian Art and Archaeology at the Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” in Italy and at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Her research focuses on early Buddhist art and cross-cultural exchange in South Asia, with a regional emphasis on the visual cultures of ancient Gandhāra (Pakistan) and the Deccan Plateau (India). She has published extensively on the Buddhist caves in the Western Deccan, including a monograph, The Buddhist Caves at Aurangabad (2010), and the edited volume Living Rock (2013). She is currently working on the MAK Project (Mapping Ancient Kṛṣṇagiri) at the Kanheri caves in Maharashtra, India, which aims to produce the first complete archaeological and epigraphic documentation of the site. She has also been a longstanding collaborator with the ISMEO-Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan and has written on architecture, visual narratives, artistic workshops, and the multicultural fabric of Buddhism in Gandhāra. She co-edited the book Gandharan Buddhism: Art, Archaeology (2006). Interview by Miles Osgood.
Stephen Bokenkamp talks about his fieldwork in China after the Cultural Revolution, how to better understand the original encounter between Daoism and Buddhism in the 2nd to 6th centuries C.E., and what Daoist and Buddhist Studies can learn from one another today. Stephen R. Bokenkamp (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1986) specializes in the study of medieval Chinese Daoism, with a special emphasis on its literatures and its relations with Buddhism. He is author of Early Daoist Scriptures ， Ancestors and Anxiety ， A Fourth-century Daoist Family: the Zhen’gao , as well as over forty articles and book chapters on Daoism and literature. Among his awards are the Guggenheim Award for the Translation of a medieval Daoist text, a National Endowment for the Humanities Translation grant and the invitation to present the Xuyun and Yanfu lectures for the Philosophy Department of Beijing University. In addition to his position at Arizona State, he has taught at Indiana University, Stanford University, and short courses for graduate students at Beijing, Princeton and Fudan Universities. He was also part of the National 985 project at the Institute of Religious Studies, Sichuan University from 2006-2013. Interview by Miles Osgood.
Ven. Bhikkhunī Dhammadinnā talks about the journey of her research in relation to the historical transmission of Buddhist texts, the process of integrating her two lives as an academic and monastic, and the relevance of Buddhism’s “two truths” doctrine in the present day. Born in Italy in 1980, Bhikkhunī Dhammadinnā went forth as a monastic in the Theravāda Buddhist tradition of Sri Lanka in 2012. She studied Indology, Indo-Iranian philology, and Tibetology at the University of Naples "L’Orientale," at the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University in Tokyo, and at the Institute for Research in Humanities at Kyoto University, receiving her doctorate in 2010 with a dissertation on the Khotanese "Book of Zambasta" and the formative phases of bodhisattva Mahāyāna ideology in Khotan in the fifth and sixth centuries. Her scholarly work focuses on early Buddhist Sūtra and Vinaya literature as well as the doctrinal and historical development of Buddhist meditative traditions in India. She is the co-founder and director of the Āgama Research Group (established in 2012) and an associate research professor in the Department of Buddhist Studies of the Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts in Taiwan. Bhikkhunī Dhammadinnā also serves as a Buddhist minister with the Italian government through the Italian Buddhist Union. Interview by Miles Osgood.
