Professor Richard Salomon has been nominated the next President of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, a learned society dedicated to promoting and supporting scholarship in Buddhist Studies, which issues a prestigious peer-reviewed journal and is based in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The nomination was announced this summer, at the seventeenth triennial conference of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, hosted by the University of Vienna, Austria, on August 18-23, 2014. Four faculty and student members of the Department of Asian Languages and Literature’s Early Buddhist Manuscripts research group were in attendance at the conference to present their work. Dr. Timothy Lenz spoke on “Avadānas and the Kitchen Sink in my suitcase;” Prof. Collett Cox on “When Commentary Begins: The Relationship between Exegetical and Canonical Literature in Early Gāndhārī Manuscripts,” and Richard Salomon on “The Deorkothar Inscriptions and Buddhist Institutional Memory.” A highlight of UW participation was the presentation by Joe Marino, AL&L graduate student and holder of the 70th Dhammachai Fellowship, entitled “Two Gāndhārī Saṃyuktāgama Sūtras of the Senior Collection,” which was enthusiastically recognized by the audience as an outstanding performance by a young scholar.
After the Vienna meeting, Prof. Salomon traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland to attend a post-conference workshop of a dozen specialists in Buddhist manuscript studies from eight different countries. The workshop was part of a long-term cooperative project to publish a unique Mahāyāna sūtra manuscript from the Bajaur District of Pakistan, dating from about the second century ce. AL&L faculty and students will continue working on this important and massive text when the organizer of the Lausanne workshop, Prof. Ingo Strauch, joins us as a visiting professor for winter and spring quarters of the 2015 academic year.