Dr. Paula R. Curtis

@James_A_Benn already helping to "de-center" us because he's traveled from Canada for the talk!

Along with the question mark, no definite or indefinite article in his talk title because he wants to also suggest there may be more than one "Buddhist Middle Ages."

For China, Benn notes, the “medieval” falls rather earlier, roughly 4th to 10th century (though not everyone agrees!). He is interested in how medieval Chinese Buddhist situated themselves in time and history.

Been is interested in the encounters Chinese Buddhists in this period had with Indian history and geographic through Buddhist texts, and how that impacted their periodization of history. A key (perhaps flawed) question: “Did medieval people know they were living in a middle age?”

(This question of self-consciousness of time and history is really interesting and something we haven’t touched on yet in our talks!)

Medieval Chinese Buddhist historiography is a major tradition, but not well understood. People did have to think about periodization, and the "decline of the Buddha Dharma" narrative isn't the only model outside dynastic time models.

Here we see the intersection of various pasts-- Chinese, Indian, Buddhist-- how do we encompass our Chinese history in a way that reconciles these different paths and pasts?

The very idea of having a Buddhist Middle Ages is very influential to our historiographical approaches, and historians of China have been using the idea of “medieval” or “middle ages” for about a century.

Benn brings up the famous Naitō hypothesis (by Naitō Konan (1866-1934)), who said there was a Chinese middle ages beginning with the end of the Han (3rd cen) and the rise of Buddhism. This creates a parallel with Rome/Christianity.

e.g. the fall of an influential empire and the rise of an external religion (wondering to myself if there were other conflicting interpretations at the time, specifically in religious studies or otherwise?)

There’s a borrowing here of Western vocabularies, and the notion of Buddhism-based periodization becomes influential in other locations like Japan, too (see the term mappō and its idea of Buddhism going through stages of rise, decline, disappearance).

I’ve always found it interesting that these stages also get tied to concrete dates in China and Japan, because there’s interesting connections to be drawn to millenarianism and other movements in diverse locations.

Benn notes that these temporalities were not just defined by decline, but some believed renewal was also a marker. And meanwhile, others, like Confucian thinkers, had their own cycles.

Need to understand better how the people we study thought about the times and places in which they lived. This also requires us to take seriously religious worldviews.

Benn urges that if we want to think about Buddhist Middle Ages in China, we have to start by looking at medieval Chinese historiographers who were tackling these questions and constructing their own notions of time and space.