 Thank you to the SOAS chandrummers A warm welcome literally I suppose a warm welcome to all of you and many thanks for making your way to SOAS on a summer evening I'm reminded nonetheless by this week's record heats We've all been suffering that a warm welcome in terravada lands is literally a cool welcome and Khmer one says to check the zoom To qualify what I would call in English in the English language warm hospitality So let me correct myself with a felicitous dual reference To our terravada and topic and to our London locale to wish you all a very cool welcome tonight Before introducing our speaker. I wanted to say a few words about the context in which we find ourselves together Here at SOAS we owe very deep thanks to the astoundingly generous and innovative Alphawood Foundation, which has enabled the establishment of the Southeast Asian Acad art Southeast Asian art academic program. We call it SAP around here It supports a broad range of activities from student bursaries to research to public-facing outreach work all focusing on the Hindu and Buddhist art of Southeast Asia and with a very broad Mission an ambitious mission. I should say to make a transformative contribution to the development of human research and Pedagogical resource in the Southeast Asian region itself It's been my pleasure to join the SOAS SAP this year and in this context to have had the opportunity to work with Kate Crosby Over there at Kings College to support a series of terravada research events in London this week So tonight is the crowning event of a first series of workshops held at Kings After the talk this evening you are all Courageously invited to attend a reception in the SOAS senior common room just one floor up in this building and Tomorrow is the full day devoted to research on the emergence of terravada in Cambodia from a number of Southeast Asian perspectives So tomorrow's is a is the last event in this week's terravada in London series And will be held at the William Goodenough House on Mecklenburg Square, and we hope to have many of you with us again tomorrow So now it's my great pleasure to introduce you all to Yuliana Schober She is the co-founder and co-director with Stephen Collins Ecy prison up here Of the terravada civilizations project about which she will be speaking this evening Yuliana Schober is professor of religious studies at Arizona State University where she is also director of the Center for Asian Research She is a multivalent Anthropologist focusing on Burmese Buddhism Her most recent book is entitled modern Buddhist conjuncture in Myanmar cultural narratives colonial legacies and civil society Yuliana's talk this evening as you can see on the screen is entitled How can the study of terravada Buddhism define as subject? So please join me in welcoming Yuliana Schober Thank you all. It's a real pleasure to be here today and Thank you in particular to Ashley Thompson and to Kate Crosby for the wonderful welcome that we've enjoyed this week here in London It's been great to have all these conversations with you And I appreciate all of the different inputs that we have Had from all of you who've attended the past The events over the past few days And I'm delighted to talk to you today about the terravada civilizations project And sketch out to you at some of what we've been doing. So Just to to Clarify That I'm indeed talking about other people's work and about a large project in progress so I am not actually providing answers to how to Define the study of terravada, but I hope to be able to raise questions about different approaches today and Look forward to your comments and Conversations in particular and just to be more concrete The talk will wind up referring specifically to if you oh, yeah See those tiny little things here indeed their bats their bats in the cave in Yunk in hill outside of Mandalay and as we've learned at the Abidam a conference and because of He jaws paper They're not just bats, but they're also disciples of Sariputra who have just listened to the Patana. So Just staying with the concrete Hopefully we'll get back there by the end of this conversation But let me begin by saying that in 2009 Group of initially 12 and then 21 scholars have been engaged in discussions about teravada Buddhism as the Civilizational force across South and Southeast Asia Our initial purpose was to delineate the parameters of comparisons of modern Teravada Buddhism, but in the course of that we also came to rethink scholarly approaches in the field of teravada Studies and its subject Teravada practices both of which are rapidly changing Our project came to engage several trajectories including on the one hand a Collaboration of scholars drawn from different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences Including history anthropology Art history the study of poly and vernacular Literatures and on the other searching for new ways to explain local and cultural diversity in the terawada Repertoire to borrow a term from Justin McDaniel Let me see if I oh, yeah a lousy map of the teravada world, but these bear with me All right, so the terawada project facilitates then an interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars That is multilingual multi-sighted and Comparative in its scope it is the kind of project that can only be undertaken by a group of scholars Because it's some is greater than the individual contributions Initially the project was organized by Steve Collins and myself And then we were able to gain the support of the Henry Luce foundation Our meetings were supported also then by many institutions including the University of Toronto Pennsylvania Chicago Arizona state the Coles Francaise The extrema ryan and now also so as and Kings College here in London And we are very grateful for the reception and hospitality and Conversations we've received during the course of the six-year project thus far Okay, in addition to our conferences Which mostly consists of conversations we have We also are preparing for publication several edited volumes And we've been hosting annual dissertation workshops we've developed a website as you'll see in a while and Steve Collins and I published a short preview of our collaborative project in the Journal of Contemporary Buddhism a year or two ago, so The study of teravada Buddhism then encompasses at its core a Literary tradition in Polly that Steven Collins has termed the Polly Imagineer It has inspired particular forms of civilizations Hegemonic kingdoms religious institutions practices for more than a millennium indeed Benedict Anderson singled out Polly as the one language that exemplifies translocal imagining of regional communities before the advent of print capitalism and modern nation states Polly Buddhist texts and inscriptions inscriptions have also shaped the development of vernacular literature Art local practices in what we now call the modern nations of mainland Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka and here in particular, I want to refer you to the work of Professor Professor Ashley Thompson and and concerning the emergence of early Buddhism in Cambodia and The conference that she has mentioned will be taking place tomorrow We are looking forward to that with great enthusiasm Teravada Buddhism is practiced now by more than a hundred and fifty million people around the world from Sri Lanka Southeast Asia and southwestern China to Vietnam Indonesia Nepal Including Dalits in India and throughout the diaspora networks of Europe North America and Australia They contribute to a discourse through which Teravada practices continue to be imagined among Buddhist communities and take on local and modern articulations in rapidly changing contexts of globalization and digitization The goal of our project then was not To compile a dictionary of Teravada Buddhism or to map its local articulations Nor did we seek out to reify some vision of a pure Teravada world Indeed, we wanted to describe the diverse practices of different places and times and show what they might have in common while asserting from the start that We are dealing with Continuities and differences that are inflected by local histories with vernacular Languages that together give rise to specific Teravada formations our discussions focused on core themes in the Pali imaginary Such as the conceptions of the Buddhist world, Dhadana or history, Vamsa And we compare such Teravada iterations across different cultural and historical contexts Indeed to trace an account for family Resemblances can be more vexing and challenging than to acknowledge difference in variation and practice and content. I Would say that over the past six years the group has Generated a unique synergy and we've come to understand each other's work in more compelling ways Our collaboration stimulated also life lead discussions about academic differences and inspired work By individual participants, or at least I'd like to think that some of that is true Many of whom have been Extraordinarily productive in their publications and I'm thinking here for example of Kate Crosby's recent books on Teravada and on its traditional Forms of meditation. I'm thinking about Christoph Emery's forthcoming book on Teravada rituals among Navari girls and I'm thinking about John Holt's forthcoming book on Buddhism and violence as well as Jake carbine's translation of the Kalyani inscriptions and other works in progress And I also think that our collaborative work has opened up new perspectives on particular research questions as we broop disciplinary boundaries and push thematic comparisons across regions cultures Histories and media our conversations also interrogated Received scholarship on Teravada traditions and here Charlie Halsey has made particularly valuable Contributions to that discussion as you all know that in fact preceded the initiation of the project But none the less continued to contribute to it Because thematic research is inherently Interdisciplinary comparative and multi-sighted our collaborations changed how we constructed Teravada studies and how we framed our inquiries Looking back it seems that we started the project with greater certainty about what constitutes Teravada then some and perhaps even most of us would assert today, but then We were so much older than As you know, I'm an anthropologist of Religion and I work on Buddhist practices in Myanmar And if you will permit me that I enter into How to locate the project from a vantage point that is familiar to me from my perspective and In particularly I wanted to focus for a moment on an earlier Development that generated new approaches in the study of Teravada Buddhism in particularly a point that was In a point in time that was Notable because of the publication of world conqueror and world renouncing by Stanley Tambaya At least for me to buy as analysis drew on both Buddhist texts Thai Ethnography and history reflecting his collaboration with Frank Reynolds during their time at the University of Chicago arguing that cosmological structures described in Practice and literature Also gave rise to galactic polities throughout Southeast Asia. This study was seen as an early Beginning of If you want a conceptual Imaginaire and its contextual historical and sources and Sources and practice in context. Okay And since then major intellectual shifts have taken place in Teravada studies Today scholars routinely draw on both textual and contextual sources and on cultural history and genealogies of knowledge Studies in the history of religion make use of ethnography and vice versa Anthropological work on Buddhism incorporates the literature and of the poly imaginary Let me briefly summarize then where I think The intellect or where I think the field was at 30 years ago and what kinds of intellectual shifts have taken place since the publication of world conqueror and world renouncer and admittedly this is rather Rough in its outlines, but nonetheless, I think it's worth noting just for the moment to give us an opportunity to locate a Collaborative project on the study of Teravada Buddhism All right, so then firstly a few if any scholars today Would argue that Teravada Buddhism is merely a philosophy That wasn't always the case And instead I think most of us would recognize that this tradition involves practices and a religious discourse And this intellectual shift locates authority and authenticity within the community of practice Practitioners and withholds judgments about theological questions I think that is very important to our approach to how to study Teravada today and in particularly The work of Anne Blackburn and also of Tom Borchard have contributed to these questions in recent publications Most scholars would accept also that orthodox doctrines of the elders reflect historically and contextually constructed discourse as well as the authorship of powerful actors and the agency of hegemonic institutions We focus in our discussions on how these debates are authorized Individually locally and socially that is to say in terms of a dynamic that goes beyond the individual This kind of intellectual shift opened up new insights into connections between Buddhism and politics and in particular Catherine Bowie's work Is something that relates here and this particular turn towards We Examining the relationships between Religion and politics or Buddhism and politics and how they intermingle has led us to re-evaluate the social function and the social effects of monastic reforms the authority of monastic lineages and institutions Finally it brought into scholarly focus a wide range of lay practices in meditation and in ritual and Illuminated their complex interactions with the Sangha this by the way is the Chinese tooth relic in young girl Rituals like the veneration of Buddha images pilgrimages or Ordinations are no longer seen as defiling Acquisitions of history, but rather as transformative practices that constitute Teravada truth in history text and culture a Fourth element and one that I think we all still struggle with in many ways because It's not when that's particularly easy to let go of is an Intellectual shift away from essentializing Buddhist notions That we might sometimes call the original words of the Buddha that comes with and yet we come to it We're now with the recognition that the Teravada Canon is an involving tradition Constructed by communities to be the pristine teachings of the Buddha This recognition and the reeds against statements as they're Asserting that in my village people do things in a particular way and that is Buddhist or in my preferred Buddhist text in my particular Buddha the following statement has been made and so on Those letting go of that kind of essentialism allows us to assess texts and narratives as part of a living Imagineer and it allows us to visit revisit the roles of monks as gatekeepers of Buddhist Teachings and in this regard I want to bring to your attention of course the work of Stephen Collins and Louis Gabbard If we were to concede then that we know indeed very little with a great deal of certainty about early Buddhism as Steve Collins has proposed at his Truanto Keynote, then we would also conclude that Teravada's understandings of early Buddhism are constructed primarily in mythic terms and So therefore the focus of our work as a group has been to historicize but Foucault referred to in his 1978 lectures at the École de France as the Dispositive meaning those genealogies and traces of civilization that map out particular and historically embedded inclinations in the normative network of social reality by tracing genealogies of practice and Disciplines in Buddhist lives we uncovered a new vocabulary and It allows us to be cognizant of a range of Teravada articulations across cultures across histories and across literary Imagineers so This is the Ananda temple in Pagan What do we mean then by the polyimaginaire and how does that relate to the Teravada civilizations project The polyimaginaire embodies Literatures and histories that are admittedly much older than the term Teravada itself We're cognizant of the limitations that underlie the term Teravada as a historical construct with different meanings at different moments in time and as a discursive field within disciplinary practices that shape sentiments dispositions institutions authority and hegemon hegemonies of merit-making Indeed In another very important volume Stephen, sorry Peter skilling Todd Pereira and Jake Carpine as well as others asked How Teravada is Teravada in order to historicize the term Teravada as a construction of late modernity, okay however, Pat Branky Made clear in his recent work that the notion of Teravada was used to refer to a particular world prior to the advent of British colonialism in Burma Important conceptual questions about how to find how to define the subject of Teravada studies emerged therefore from our conversations Indeed questions are how do we theorize links between practice text and history? Other questions that came to the fore are how can we move from the Universal to the local and vice-versa How can we move from individual narratives to larger social and salient Formations that shape the lives of communities and civilizations? How do we avoid the dangers of Extrapolating too much information from particular narratives and over interpret in this manner and what can be compared across Teravada civilizations and how can we describe those phenomena as they are refracted in individual lives Questions like these and their score the need for interdisciplinary Collaboration and I think that's really what is novel and new and different about our project and It also underscored the need to find new methods to extract information from our material I don't mean to suggest that we re-resolved all of those questions far be it from that but There's a great deal to be gained by asking them and As we worked to redefine the subject of our study Teravada across national Linguistic ethnic and social boundaries. We also wanted to make explicit how themes in the poly imagineers Came to be articulated locally as our initial perspectives changed new concerns emerged about Translation about readings of texts and contexts about shifts in language between poly and vernacular languages and about the construction of meaning and its social relevance at any particular moment in time and We've worked to develop a new kind of meta language that would capture shared premises of this Collaborative workshop or of this collaborative project by rethinking how and what we study And so we're looking forward to the publication of edited volumes That will bring some of these issues to the fore Some of those contributions of essays will be think single authored and some of them will be jointly authored, but I think you will find that they constitute or are reflective of a larger collaborative project so What then are the themes in the study of Teravada? Civilizations with that in mind of what I've just all laid out. Can we go back to work? I would argue yes, we can but in a different way and so for the remainder of my talk I want to outline some examples of What that new vocabulary entails and How we might proceed with that Okay, I think I'm a little ahead of my pictures, but that's all right For the purposes of the project Civilization denotes not an essentialized classic model of refinement, but rather a generative open-ended poly-imaginaire involving discourses, practices, discipline, sensibilities to construct meaningful reality across multi-ethnic social and historical geographies As we trace these genealogies of knowledge through time and space we came to historicize the Dispositive of those traces and technologies that form an enduring formation and form enduring institutions as Talal Assad reminds us Religious ideas and practices are inseparable from the social context within which they emerge Religion after all is a product of the human imagination By the same token Buddhist discourses and practices draw upon Repertoire in the poly-imaginaire about cultural narratives told in emic terms like Bhavana, Nibbana, Datu, Kudo, Kutla, Dana, Samsara, Sangha and so on and They create cultural meaning in particular social formations and hegemonies From this premise we began to develop new insights into how for example Hegeographical genres about the Buddha continued to shape the lives of Theravada Buddhists today narratives about the Buddha's lives about the Jadakas and about apocryphal versions link individual lives to That larger universe and by the same token they also connect the periphery to the center and to previously uncivilized places Theravada seek to discipline the self Through techniques like meditation and ritual ordination to establish membership in an ascetic community of the Sangha Such practices train individuals to transcend as Steve Collins has put it recently To transcend I hope I'm not misquoting To transcend self-interest and in praise an ideal Of personhood that is defined as a non-self They are conveyed for instance in the social habitus of monks in the physical and mental training They undergo in the careful folding of their monastic ropes in the measured movements with which they trans With which they trans walk across this space and also By the ways in which they rehearse chanting of memorized texts Those are Shri Jin monks reciting their evening meditation and we can also see it in the protocols of veneration Shown to sources of merit like monastic elders relics and Buddha images in other words Disciplines of the self embody the Theravada tradition and evoke the Pali imaginary these practices Sustained particularly privileged status of aesthetics and their technologies in complex social systems Civilizations that again has been a point that Steve has made in his recent work on asceticism the attainment of nibbana therefore Constitutes an authoritative social status that is central to that particular civilization and epistemology This is a Burmese painted pair bike. I believe the original is in the British Museum depicting the enlightenment of the Buddha or the moment just prior to as he's being attacked by Mara's armies and I wanted to use this image as a segue into talking about Visual representations of the Buddha, but also in the case of this particular image I wanted to try to your attention that Mara of course is understood as the embodiment of evil and the threat to the Dispensation that the Buddha overcomes at this particular moment And so this episode depicting the assault of Mara can also be used as a justification for the defense of Buddhism which in recent Events we have seen both in Myanmar as well in Sri Lanka and elsewhere So this scene can thus also be read as a defense of samsara and the ultimate victory of the teachings over its detractors Defending the Dhamma can be interpreted as a noble action indicating highest spiritual attainment So but really I wanted to use it as an entree to talk about images and about Buddhist relics and note that Buddhist material and visual objects like images and relics are Representations of enlightenment that figure importantly in the creation of communities This is my daughter by the way And this is in Mandalay Buddha pointing to the site that was to become the place where Mindong built the last gongbong palace All right, so Peter Pells has argued that icons are objects with agency mediate social realities Buddhist objects are informed by aesthetic styles of the poly-imaginaire and yet also Express local histories in becoming the Buddha Don Swearer shows us how Buddhist images Become embodied in the presence of the Buddha through ritual settings the mediation of narrative through material form and aesthetic style in painting film digital and virtual media thus constitutes a kind of a Dhamma scape and I use that word in reference to Charles Hershkin's notion of a soundscape in the study of Islamic preachings on video and Cassettes in Egypt and I think that it has been very usefully used or Employed that notion in the study of the anthropology of religion Recently, so I wanted to bring it into this particular project Artistic styles of Buddha images are usually named after dynasties to indicate not historical chronology, but instead the powerful patrons of the fields of merit Constituted through the orders through the consecration of the image for example the Mahamuni image and tears the close up of it as you can see It's it's laden with golden jewels and every once in a while It's also slimmed down and most recently. I think that was done by the bar Perhaps to generate some income, but In any case the Mahamuni image continues to figure importantly in its current location in Mandalay and It presents a particular kind of reading of the history in place fashioned by centuries of Erichanese Burmese narratives about Subjugation and hegemony its presence in Mandalay today Here you can see how indeed the image has been distorted by the many offerings of gold leaf it has received It's image in press its presence in Mandalay today Continues to transform the lives of many pilgrims who offer food and wash the images face Each day a dawn the comic results of these transformative narrative Rituals are mediated not only by the original icon shown here But equally importantly by countless copies of the Mahamuni image that Mediate Terada sentiments and dispositions and replicate fields of merit across time and space Merit gained from ritual practice like the face washing becomes manifest Not only through future rewards, but it is also constructed But also constructs the social fabric of social and political relationships particularly in traditional settings giving dana and giving oneself through ordination our central tropes in this Reality the reality of the Sasana and in Burma as elsewhere in the Teravada world Buddhist practices particularly those involving merit-making rituals have long been inseparable from politics Traditionally kings were expected to be patrons of Buddhist institutions and their power was understood as a reflection of their moral practice Teravada social formations produced classic Buddhist kingdoms ensuring the longevity and profound influence of the Teravada tradition creating a Tathana creating a Buddhist world Royal and local chronicles often Describe those hegemonic fields of marriage of merit and their patrons and affirm their charisma authenticity and authority Such history gives voice to epistemologies of the Pali imaginary in order to create specifically Teravada world views and here I want to mention the work of shocklighter Pat prankie and Steve Burke was all of whom who have have contributed to Investigating these aspects in their publications Through this discourse Teravada's Construct an understanding of the Sasana that profoundly shapes the world that they inhabit socially intellectually and culturally where the Buddha is present and venerated and where as Bob Hefner would say the really real constitutes semiotic ideologies This Teravada understanding of time and place creates a particular historical consciousness expressed in chronicles and in other junior law genealogies of the dispensation This is a view of the top of Shwitagong It's a photograph on exhibit at least when I was there at the museum at Shwitagong in Yangon and I thought it was interesting because it showed the very tip of the pagoda against the skyline of What was at least an imagined modern city? So I want to turn our attention then to questions of modernity and Buddhism Most Teravada's experienced modernity as part of a secular power and part of colonization introduced by European powers and here I want to refer you to the work of Anne Blackburn who has written about that with regard to changes and Continuities in Buddhism it Modernity profoundly affected traditional life ways Predicated on a holistic Teravada that Anna and its social relationships new Teravada formations emerged in response to competing secular knowledge political power and Social practices and Tom Borgert has written about that with regard to a contemporary Thailand as well monks and kings and Thailand Burma Cambodia and elsewhere in the Teravada world and acted far-reaching institutional changes and reforms and Formulated modern ethics as Anne Hansen has shown in her book how to behave How can the Vinaya remain relevant in modern contexts? in the early 20th century Burma and Sri Lanka Transgressions of monastic discipline formed the plot of provocative novels that depicted monastic individuals as narrative subjects and Express their profound disenchantment with the modern Colonial period and so here's a moment where monks who elsewhere in the Teravada tradition have been almost Anonymous authors and progressively more known authors, but here they actually become subject of modern narratives and the Focus of the subject is their disenchantment with traditional Buddhist practice I think that's a quite remarkable moment of Modernity and I think at least at one point one of Charlie's students with Thinking about doing a dissertation on this, but I'm not sure if that's still so So in his recent work on ways a Buddhist wizards who practice Meditation and some form of self-ordination oftentimes Pat prankie has indeed documented alternate responses to rationalizing reforms that are not beauty and other Popularization of Buddhism through lay meditation and other practices in Prankie's work, but also in Kate Crosby's new book on the suppression of traditional meditation We find that successful Buddhist reforms silence disempower and marginalize Those who alleged use of magic is said to subvert Righteous fields of merits Those who elude reforms initiated by the center often retreat to the forest This move is not merely an attempt to elude coercion from the center Departing for the forest is also a common trope for the quest for enlightenment as stories about such charismatic individuals Recall salient episodes in the life of the Buddha and I want to introduce you to one of those places That is a way the perspective is a little difficult to capture, but it is also difficult to photograph This is indeed yonkin hill where you find staircase going down into a crotto And it is in that grotto that I took the picture that is on the poster for today's talk so Yonkin hill is a way a way a place away from the center. It's away from the Mandalay City and former court as a place where people took refuge at the end of World War two and As its name indicates it is a place that is supposed to provide protection Okay so It also houses a number of small forest monasteries and meditation cells and And it houses many several powerful icons as you can see here and It is also home to Burmese ways us and a number of smaller Hidden caves that seem to be dedicated more to personal practices So you find this larger public space, but also very hidden Caves within that hill region outside of Mandalay yonkin hill and you also find occasional Pilgrims that visit the crotto on top of the mountain and Deep inside it other responses to modern Transfurbations compromise change a comprised changes in modern education curricula in the rise of lay authority through meditation and In changes of in gender roles in the roles of women in Buddhist orders And here I want to refer you again to the work of Nancy Eberhard and also Christoph Emery both of whom have worked on gender and Buddhist practice and another aspect of modern response in Buddhist practices concerns the commodification of some modern Buddhist practices Here you see a shop in the Mandalay market where monks can Buy robes and things of that sort Okay, we know that the rise of inside meditation Vipassana has not just been an innovation for lay practice, but also has become an epitome of modern Buddhism and Cosmopolitanism it's widely popular and varied forms of practice have been disembedded from the cultural context of their production and appropriated by other religious and secular communities Diverse forms of Buddhist modernism and contemporary Tera Vada now extend to a global multi-ethnic and multi-sided diaspora digitized modes of the communication and virtual realities that shape emergent Tera Vada formations and And I want to conclude my Traversing of the Tera Vada world by focusing for a moment on others Tera Vada Buddhism and others to know that Monolithic representation like I've just engaged you in the Tera Vada Buddhist Sangha and Buddhist practices in places like Myanmar and Sri Lanka Have been sort of at the forefront of our study and they have occupied the attention of their academic interlocutors and they have often submerged tensions with surrounding religious and ethnic the different communities Tera Vada civilizational narratives their Teological histories and their moral reasoning are not accepted by many religiously and ethnically different groups that inhabit the same geography We therefore must ask how Tera Vada civilizations encounter the other Those living right outside the Pali Imagineer How do Tera Vada's accommodate other religious epistemologies in times of prosperity? Questions about who belongs to Tera Vada communities may not be pressing but in recent crises Buddhists have advocated a defense of the Dharma that became manifest as violent attacks on non Buddhist others Exclusionary formations of identity and belonging have come to characterize a sizable number of Buddhists who like their non Buddhist neighbors have become both victims and perpetrators of communal violence and And here I want to work refer you to the work of Shaq Leiter and John Holt and perhaps also to some of my own writings as well as the fact that we hope to Dedicate some of our future Conversations on the Buddhist Tera Vada Buddhist encounter with others Let me conclude then today with an image of A Buddhist relics in Mandalay you can see here they are encased although the hard to make out and I think that's the purpose of it In any case Here we are at our website and I invite you all to take a closer look at This particular website that also serves community that of scholars that you may join if you so wish at Tera Vada Siv.org It's free for anyone who is interested and it is it serves a professional group that We've started up a year or two ago and that is now formally associated with the Association for Asian Studies That means we meet once a year In a public meeting in conjunction with the Association for Asian Studies So next time it would be in March in Seattle when the Association for Asian Studies meets But we hope that this net Website will help facilitate a scholarly network engaged In the study of Torah Tera Vada and particularly bring in the interests of younger scholars Who might be interested in becoming involved through conferences or by applying to the annual dissertation workshop Or even just through virtual participation on the website you can establish a profile You can list your publications. You can even begin discussions So and you can look for new announcements of publications events conferences and the like all right So by now we have a newsletter as well as more than 200 members of the Tera Vada studies group around the world and I Invite you to join if you are interested and I'd like to thank you for indulging me in Traversing a reimagined kind of study of Tera Vada Buddhism one that I don't own But I have merely tried to represent An effort of a scholarly group that is working collaboratively and I think that has a great many Benefits to it because we can draw on everybody's expertise. So thank you for your attention