Keynote Lecture: Dr. Lina Verchery, “The Great Earth and Its Tiny Creatures”

About this event

This event is sponsored by the RHNHFF BCS Program, with generous support of the International Association of Shin Buddhist Studies (IASBS). This event is hybrid, free and open to the public, and can be attended in person or online via Zoom. Registration required. In-Person Registration | Online Registration This keynote is part of the academic Conference, Pure Land Buddhism and the Great Earth. About this Event Animated by a call to urgently rethink our relationship with the nonhuman world in light of compounding ecological crises, scholarly work across a variety of fields—including the study of Buddhism and Asian religions—has begun to acknowledge that what it means to be human is inextricably determined by our relations with the more-than-human world. While work in this area has inspired new attention to the lifeworlds of plants, fungi, nonhuman animals, and complex ecosystems, much of it still unwittingly centers the very anthropocentric epistemes it attempts to displace. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association in Taiwan—a Chinese monastic community heavily steeped in Pure Land practice—this talk explores how Buddhist scriptures, commentaries, and the everyday practices of monastic life offer conceptual resources that challenge human-centered ways of knowing. Taking up the specific case of Buddhist engagement with insects (chong 蟲)—those tiny creatures who so powerfully defy anthropocentric relatability—I argue that the alterity of insects has made them an exceptionally productive site for moral reflection beyond the human, not only within the relatively recent more-than-human turn in academia but across the vast historical landscape of Chinese religion, literature, and thought. This talk thus attends not only to the question of the Buddhist insect imaginaire—namely, the way humans have imaginatively constructed ideas about insects and used those as a lens through which to understand Buddhist ideas like rebirth, karma, and cosmology —but also, and most importantly, the question of how insect agents themselves have been implicated in the cocreation of Buddhist ideas. The human imagination, I argue, is inseparable from the more-than-human world that co-constitutes the conditions of its possibility. While this leads to philosophical insights that resonate with emerging postmodern and even metamodern thought—such as actor-network theory, New Materialisms and Object-Oriented Ontologies, agential realism, ecosemiotics, post-humanism, and so on—we shall see that many of these “cutting-edge” theoretical innovations actually recapitulate ideas that have long been robustly theorized in the Buddhist tradition. About the Speaker Lina Verchery 黎娜 is a filmmaker and scholar of Buddhism. She holds a PhD in Buddhist Studies from Harvard University’s Committee on the Study of Religion and an M.Div. in Buddhism from Harvard Divinity School. A trained ethnographer, her areas of research and teaching include contemporary Chinese Buddhism and Buddhist monastic life, as well as the intersections of Buddhism and art, interspecies ethics, and environmental anthropology. She is a full member of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars, prior to which she was Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand. She has also taught at the University of Otago and Union College. An award-winning filmmaker, her documentary films about Buddhism and connected topics have been screened in festivals and on television networks around the world.