 Okay, Moises, I'm here to announce that the aura rising in the room makes the world about to start. So very good evening to everyone and welcome to this special event in a special series of events. The special series of events is, of course, the lecture series in Chinese Buddhism, generously sponsored by the Robert N. H. Ho foundation. And I would like to take this opportunity to thank my sponsor really for helping us to set up this very, very interesting and successful series of lectures. Normally we have three double events each year. So there is a lecture on a Friday evening followed by a seminar on the following Saturday morning. And normally we tend to balance between three main areas. So the history of art, the history and options of Buddhism, and in particular the contemporary. So this year, for example, we're having Stephanie Travagnan in January talking about modern and contemporary Buddhism in China. And we're going to have James Robson from Harvard, I think, in May. So, so much for the special series of events, but of course we have a particularly special event tonight. And it's special because it is the inaugural lecture this year. And because we have a special guest, quite very famous and popular, and who's prompted by Onomisa. So Professor Lothar Ledero says with us this evening. To talk about, I think, something that goes well beyond Buddhism and has a lot to say also about Chinese history. Professor Ledero is a senior professor in the history of East Asian art at the University of Heidelberg. And I think it is fair to say that it would take perhaps as long as the whole lecture's lot to go through his publications and interests and everything. Before I came to this room, we were just discussing actually my very first acquaintance with his work. It goes back when I was a graduate student and was writing my degree thesis on something related to medieval Taoism. And actually was something that he published on Tomba in the 1980s about calligraphy and Taoism under the 16th century. But then, of course, this is just one corner of this manifold interest, which of course to embrace calligraphy as a form of art, to embrace a lot of China and Japan. And among his seminal publications, certainly I should mention in his 2000, but 10,000 things, on the very idea of the modular concepts, which I think was eye-opening in many respects about the way that literally Chinese art, but many things in the Chinese culture actually work. And I think it was because of that they were given a Balzan Prize easily. And actually I just discovered this evening that you've got Wikipedia pages in English, which is fair enough, right? In German, fair enough. In Chinese, you would expect it, but in Italian. And now you see there is a sort of special connection between these cultures. And I think that's why you would give the special prize in connection to that. So we're talking about China and Japan, so East Asia. We're talking about calligraphy. We're talking about the history of art. And then we're talking about Buddhism, which perhaps is slightly late-comer, but not a recent addition to your impressive film and expertise. And I think that the things that the Lord has going to talk about today and tomorrow are related in long-term projects on Buddhist epigraphy and rock, carved sutras in a number of locations in China, in particular in Sichuan, in Shandong, later there will be something from Shanxi. And the first ongoing product of this has been, of course, a series of publications, seven volumes so far on Buddhist sutras in China. So I think in Chinese it's Zhongguo, Fodiao, Shijing, something like that. And now we have reached seven fully published volumes, but I think eight and nine, very soon. Soon, not very soon. And what I really like about this man, that actually we are talking about a project stretching into 2028. So it needs a monumental man to work on such a monumental scale. But without further ado, let's now take the floor and talk about China writing differently. Thank you. Thank you very much, Antonello, for this very kind and nice introduction. I hope we will all meet again in 2028. But I'll just start right away and show you this first slide. This is a mountain in North America. And from 1927 to 1941, can you still hear me when I walk around? The sculptors Gotsen-Borknum and his son Lincoln, they carved the colossal portraits of the American presidents. Can you see this? Yeah, I mean, it's here. George Washington, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt, and of course Abraham Lincoln. And you see this is the place for President Trump. You can already see his hair. But I mean, through these figures, the formerly very remote, inconspicuous and unknown mountain in South Dakota, in the middle of the North American continent, became a visible and tangible symbol of political power and of the rock-solid foundation and everlasting power of the American nation. Now, about 1,200 years earlier, we see this in 730, in such run, many of you will have been there. And their Buddhist monks began to carve this colossal statue of the Buddha Maitreya into the rock. And this mountain was also transformed by this statue. And it became a symbol, not only a symbol of Buddhist religious power, but also a source of this religious power. The Buddha is present here. He is present and he can be physically experienced and he can be venerated and worshipped by people who are here, down here, and his religious power emanates from this figure. Now, we come to this remote part of Shandong, and in Shandong province, and we also find Buddhists, Buddhists carved into the rock, but those are not represented in human form or as icons, but they are represented by written characters. And actually, this is the barren part of Shandong we were talking about before. Nobody goes there. It's hard to imagine that you find these stretches in the middle of bustling China, but here you find inscriptions carved into stone and they were discovered by a shepherd. The shepherd who goes with his sheep around every day and they eat the little grass which they still can find. And this shepherd discovered the Buddhist inscription. And then one was this here, Darkung Wangfo. At the time, it didn't have the white color, of course. It just engraved and the shepherd discovered this. The Buddha of the great, or let's say the great Buddha, King of Emptiness. But I mean, you have to instruct me, is it the great Buddha or the great emptiness or is it the great king? Anyway, the Buddha, King of Great Emptiness. Let's leave it like that. And this is on the mountain called Hongding Shan. And these characters are more than 9 meters high. This line is 9 meters high and the largest character, Da, here, measures from here to here, 3.4 meters. I mean, pretty large. Here we are climbing. I'm not very venerable. But this is our Chinese friend, Mr. Wang, who takes the rubbing of the inscription. And of course, in rubbings you can see much clearer than on the rock what the inscription looks like. Although this is something we learned during our research in the field that even rubbings are not necessarily all reliable. I mean, no, that is one thing of rubbings are reliable, they are prints, but they are not. For example, whether this really looks like this, like a hand, it's hard to know. And we have examples of the same inscriptions with two different rubbings. If you put them side by side, it's amazing. They are just different. The people rub out what they think there is. I mean, mostly, of course, they do the right thing, but they are border cases. Now, this, there is another one, Da Shan Yen 4, the Buddha of great mountain cliff. Da Shan Yen 4, the Buddha of the great mountain cliff, nearby. And originally, this one also looked like this, so it's hard to find. I mean, it needs a shepherd with eyes to find such things. These two names now are very interesting. They are not in the canon. We know that there are thousands, more than 10,000 Buddha names in the Buddhist canon, but these two names are not. They are local Buddhas. They are local Buddhas. And by engraving their names into this rock, they are conjured up from the depths of the cosmos and they're brought into existence here in our world and they made to reside in this mountain. So both, I hope it's true. We can talk about it. Both engravings date from the 560s AD. Just a short discretion. Let us for a moment think how these engravings got there. It's not easy. For here you see the detail with the star and you see the traces of the brush movement, hewn into stone. It's hard to imagine a calligrapher standing there and wielding this brush and especially the 3.4 meters long stroke. I mean, how do you do this? It's pretty steep. Actually, this is still steeper than the Dakong Wang Fu where you saw the photo of Mr. Wan taking the rubbing. So possibly they could have built a scaffolding and somebody would have swept this, but even that is hard to imagine because you need scaffolding almost for each character. So do you have an idea what the solution, one possible solution could be? One possible solution would be this. You have somebody writing huge characters on the floor and this is the famous calligrapher Wang Dong Ling who wrote this just a month ago in Hangzhou and I mean, this is a practice, a general practice to write on the floor with a huge brush and one could imagine that somebody wrote these Datong Yan Fu characters on the floor and probably not on paper but on a cloth and the cloth would then be put onto the rock because the cloth adapts to the uneven surface of the rock through the cloth you could engrave the characters. That's one possibility. I have talked about this with several, I mean often with Chinese specialists and there is no unanimous idea how it was done but I mean to me this looks quite plausible. Now, come back to the Buddhist issues. This is a Chinese lady praying below three icons of three Buddhas and these icons face the lady on high pedestals in the back of a liturgic room on the central axis of this room and the interesting thing is that in Christianity we find very similar situations like this. This is in al-Dutting near Munich, a sort of pilgrimage site and it seems to me quite comparable also on the central axis in the elevated icon of the Virgin even the gold and red color scheme sort of evokes the sacred atmosphere both comparable. But this you will not find in Europe. This is a lady praying in front of a character not a statue of the Buddha but in front of the character Buddha and this means and here I'm coming to the center of my talk actually or one of the centers that the relation between the written word and the thing that it points to is different in China. I mean in China this character takes part of the essence of the Buddha. It can be venerated. I mean you can pray in front of a character. You couldn't do this in the West. I mean you'd never find a similar situation where you have the word Christ let's say printed and people praying in front of this. So that means the relation between signifier and signifier is completely different in the logographic Chinese script. Chinese characters are visually and physically they partake in the essence of what they signify. You may have read or remember Michel Foucault. He begins his big book Limo Ilé shows of 1966 by recalling his own chattering laughter together with his friend after seeing the astounding taxonomy of animals in what he calls a certain Chinese encyclopedia. And the seemingly meaningless categories lead him into the central theme of his book which is the relation between words and things. But even half a century ago this French intellectual should have known better. In China the relation between Limo Ilé shows is simply different from that in the West. Now another issue coming to another issue is the iconography of death. The iconography of death of the founder of the religion. Perhaps the most fundamental difference between men and animals or one of the most fundamental differences is that from childhood on we know that we will die. And over simplifying we might say that much if not even all or very much of what we call culture springs from that awareness. And helping us in coming to terms with death. And again I'm over simplifying is one of the main functions of religion. The cross, the most ubiquitous symbol in Christianity and everywhere you see it is a simple and simple reminder of death. When we see a cross we are reminded that someday we will die. This now is the iconographically most explicit representation of a cross. Grünwald's Eisenheimer-Alter piece completed around 1515. Now in Buddhist art too we have an iconography of the religious founder and iconography of the Buddha's death. And this colossal figure more than 20 meters long in Zetran in the grove of the reclining Buddha, War for Yuan in Anya County shows the Buddha in the moment of death. But whereas Grünwald presents Christ's vulnerable, mortal, suffering body this Buddha's body is lying quietly and covered by a well-pleated garment and his face is serene. Yet both iconographies, both iconographies convey this similar message or the same message actually that death will be overcome. Christ's body will be resurrected and ascend to paradise and as we know the Buddha is not simply dying but he is entering Nirvana and Nirvana is the sphere of ultimate bliss. Now several of the large Buddhist compounds in Asia center on this scene, the colossal Buddha statue. Well not this scene but on the colossal Buddha statue. I mean think of this Bamiyan you know which was blown up by the Taliban in 2001 and in East Asia these statues show the Buddha standing like here or sitting. We saw the Buddha in Lershan in the very beginning standing Buddha figure or they sit in meditation like here in Kamakura dated 1248 but colossal statues of the reclining Buddha are more common in South and Southeast Asia. In East Asia that in War for Yuan in Sichuan is almost an exception I mean there are other examples often they are in the rear of liturgical caves but the statue of the reclining Buddha which you just saw in Sichuan is by being there turns this valley into a replica a replica of the site in India Kushinagara where the Buddha entered Nirvana but it is more than a replica what makes this statue or this grove actually in Sichuan into more than a replica of Kushinagara is the fact that the giant statue on the one side of the valley is matched by a giant quantity of texts this is the valley which with the giant figure the giant figure is to the left it would be here somewhere and across the valley with these rice fields here you can imagine there are this southern escapement and into these rock walls there are engraved caves and caves have been carved out of the rocky cliff and I show the aerial view this is here the Buddha is lying here which we just saw and the caves are marked here by little squares and the yellow caves are those which contain sutra engraved sutras these caves do not contain sutras they have either sculptures or they have not been finished at all or even left empty and to the right here if you go up here to the right there is another part of this valley here and beyond this lake you have more caves here all the row of caves together there are about 120 caves but here only one cave 109 and 110 are filled with engraved sutras and to get there you need to go by boat and then you will have to climb up somewhere here up to these caves now I show you some of the caves they are here some of the caves and there are more caves here there are four caves for the get into the upper ones of course you need a ladder and these caves are cube shaped they are like cubicles cube simple cubes and they have a reveal around the entrance and now let's look into one of those caves oh no yeah this is the scaffolding for the caves 109 and 110 and you see these caves up here and the locals nicely very nicely and expertly built this scaffolding for us to climb up into these caves this is the view into one of those caves and they are just simple boxes box shaped and this is the engraving you see the engraving one wall is little bit more than 2 by 2 meters 220 by 220 meters and it contains about 10,000 characters and 10,000 characters is the average of one scroll I mean average of course it varies a lot but so you have one scroll carved into the wall and this is a detail of one of these walls you see how the characters are engraved they are about 2 by 2 centimeters 4 square centimeters each character now it was planned we can extrapolate this from various by various means it was planned to engrave a total of 2 million characters in the groves but they were not finished and so on but anyway the most conspicuous in the largest text is the Nirvana Sutra and the Nirvana Sutra has more than 300,000 characters and its focus is the Buddha's death and it sort of complements the Nirvana Sutra complements the colossal statue in the northern wall now our work we have been there since 2010 and we have not quite finished but we are coming close to an end we record all the characters on the walls that are still extant now if you look at this the Buddha now rather the body the body of the Buddha is present in this grove in two forms one is the iconic colossal figure and the other is the iconic and iconic not iconic script in these written sermons in his sermons and maybe I should explain this a bit more in Christianity we have to compare again with Christianity we have an intricate and theological discussion, many deliberations that deal with the multiple forms of the body of Christ, the Corpus Christi there is a mortal body of Christ seen in Grunewald's altarpiece a transfigured body in Grunewald's ascension scene and then the body of Christ as you know is present in the Last Supper and even the church itself may be called Corpus Christi in Buddhism too the body of the Buddha is the topic of a manifold discourse there is a historic Buddha but this is only one possible form of the Buddha's body or was one possible form in our age and this is just another out of countless examples of representations of the Buddha's body 830 in the Japanese temple Gingodji it shows the Buddha in meditation pose and here we cannot say what time this is at which moment he is shown and we cannot say where he sits he is beyond time and space this body of the Buddha and in this sense it can be compared to the transfigured body of Christ which we saw so the body of Christ manifests itself in various ways as I just said but never in script but the Buddha the body of the Buddha does this in his written sutras he manifests himself and this can be demonstrated easily by relics in the pagoda as you probably know relics or let's say a pagoda is the tomb of the Buddha and this is why every pagoda should contain relics from his body like again in Christianity relics of saints are deposited in the altar of every Christian church and in Buddhism the Buddhists don't use the relics of saints but they use the relics of the Buddha whereas Christians cannot use the relics of the Christ because Christ went up into heaven so they have to use relics of saints but there is of course a problem that there are not enough relics this is the pagoda of Roderick knows this in and out he has written about this a lot and it was built in the 9th century and there inside in the crypt were discovered this seven nested caskets with relics and in the smallest casket here there was a bone relic of the Buddha in here now the innermost casket contains the bone relic in the crypt under the pagoda now these are some of the one million pagodas miniature pagodas which the Japanese emperors had made from 764 to 770 and actually just saw today in the wonderful Buddhist exhibition in the British Library one of these pagodas they were given to the British Library now what did the Japanese emperors do I mean she could never dream of getting one million bone fragments from the Buddha to put into those pagodas but the pagodas needed relics to be efficacious so what she did is she inserted into the pagoda the printed texts with the Buddha's words and you see these small sutra printed sutra actually also an amazing feat the earliest printed sutras in Japan one million prints and these sutras are also the Buddha the body of the Buddha so in Sichuan in the grove of the reclining Buddha which we saw the relics are not in pagodas but in the caves as we saw these cube shaped caves but these caves are also related to relic cascades I mean Jessica Rossen who is sitting here has written a brilliant article in one of our volumes about one of these cubical caves it's the only one which has an ornament on the walls and where the sutra fields are encased by these ornaments and she has shown that with these ornaments and their arrangement this cave is actually likened to a sutra cave sutra casket where you have the sutras in a casket so the caves are one could say sutra caskets and when you go into the cave you are in a sutra casket and there is another similarity to tombs these are han dynasty tombs and you go in there they also have these reveals they are in a rock cliff and it can be compared to these caves in Wofo Jan which we saw I mean also similar and they have these reveals and what is similar to the function is that in these caves these are tombs and you keep the body of the deceased the body of the people in the family who have deceased have gone and you can later still enter this tomb you can enter and you can put in new bodies or you can venerate the bodies you can know about the liturgy which was performed there but certainly there was some liturgy in these tombs and the same is true for the caves in Wofo Jan here not the mortal body is preserved but the body of the Buddha is preserved and you can also go in there and do veneration we don't know unfortunately we have no idea what really happened in these caves but anyway they were accessible and in these caves then the Buddha's body is still preserved even after his mortal body has left this world so there is this unique combination in the grave of the in Wofo Jan the grove of the reclining Buddha it has on the one hand the statue of the Buddha which makes the grove as we said turns it into a replica of the Indian Kushinagara but in addition and this is the unique Chinese addition it doesn't exist in India come these engraved characters and so together the statue of the Buddha and the engraved sutras they turn the grove into a compelling testament of overcoming death it is one of the great monuments of Buddhist art in Asia now I come to a third point and that is the political role of Buddhism and the role of writing in politics as we know around 100 AD two large empires existed on the Eurasian continent the Roman Empire and the Empire of the Han dynasty and they were quite comparable in size they have shown a map where they are superimposed the two emperors are superimposed I mean you get an idea that they are roughly comparable size and they were also comparable in population people think they both comprise about 60 million people and more comparisons concern the emperor as one emperor and a lean administration and a net of highways as well as a common language which guaranteed cultural and political coherence and both empires built I mean used large infantry armies to protect the empires from assaults from outside from inner Asia and for this purpose we know I mean the famous great wall and the limous here or Hadrian wall up here near Scotland and quite comparable but in both empires the walls did not prevent that the people from inner Asia prevailed and in both cases it was one reason that in the third and fourth centuries the empires broke up into two parts the Roman Empire in the west and east and the Roman Empire and China in the northern and southern dynasties now many people have written about the comparison and compared to Rome and Han or Han Chinese empire but I have maybe I haven't read enough but I have not found so much about the fact that which is another parallel that this break up of the two empires was accompanied by the invasion and expansion of a new religion here Christianity and their Buddhism in both world religions we are not tied to one political territory and both had sacred scriptures and languages such as Hebrew, Greek and Latin here or Sanskrit, Pali Tibetan, Chinese and others on the other side and both creeds were radically metaphysical if I'm not sure we can use that word but we can talk about it anyway their followers yearned for a world beyond ours and our world to them was a parallel of tears obviously to the people of the time the break up of the empires appeared as a calamity which needed to be healed and in both cases the big question was whether the new religion could play a constructive role in this process of coming together again and different answers were given in Rome, Nero Emperor Nero but in 313 Constantine gained victory in the sign of the cross and in China where the north had in the meantime split into two parts the northern Zhou dynasty in the west and the northern Qi dynasty yellow in the east the situation was similar under the northern Qi which lasted from 550 to 579 Buddhism flourished as never before on Chinese soul soil some 30,000 monasteries large and small are reported to have existed populated by about 3 million monks and nuns about 10% of the entire population and they created fantastic rock engravings of Buddhist sutra texts under the open sky such as the two Buddha inscriptions which we saw in the very beginning I mean the Dakong Wang Fu and Dashan Yen Fu and the largest of the inscription is this one the Diamond Sutra on Mount Tai which we are going to discuss in the seminar tomorrow now these engravings of calligraphy are one impressive corpus of physical remains that have come down to us from the northern Qi testifying to the religious zeal of the period and the other big corpus are stone sculptures also amazing in numbers and quality and as you know in recent years spectacular finds were made in Qingzhou, Shandong with hundreds of fragments of Buddhist sculptures like those here and the selection was here shown in an exhibition in London a couple of years ago which you may have seen and these figures were probably smashed during the persecution about which I will talk in a minute but having been preserved under the earth these pieces polychrome paint on these pieces were still preserved and this is very rare but these fragments let us imagine how colorful 6th century sculptures must originally have looked like many are now in the museums of the world yet the northern Qi dynasty was not going to last Emperor Wu of the neighboring northern Zhou launched one of the most atrocious Buddhist persecution first in 574 in his own realm and then in the land of Qi which he conquered and the capital Ye of Qi fell on February 22, 577 and then it is said the emperor had 500 high clergymen assembled before his throne and declared his irrevocable will to eradicate their faith the monks stood silently the sources tell us and tears in their eyes only one of them spoke up and warned the emperor that for his bad deeds he would have to suffer in hell you can imagine this one monk to have looked like this this is a figure in the Cleveland Museum of Art of the northern Qi dynasty of a monk but the emperor did not care he gave order to dissolve the monasteries melt down the holy icons made of copper and gold and turn them into coins and burn the scriptures written on paper and silk and his aim was to build up his military to his strengths that might enable him eventually to conquer all of China to reunite the empire all monks were defrocked and pressed into military service and the conquest of Qi to the east was the first big step in reuniting the empire yet as the Buddhist sources tell us there was a happy end for Buddhists in little more than a year the emperor was stricken by a malicious leprosy no medicine could cure him and within seven days a 36-old monarch perished on June 21st 578 although his successor instantly reversed the most severe anti-Buddhist measures in the northern Zhou dynasty was doomed in 581 it was overpowered by the three dynasty and its emperor Wen was an artist Buddhist believer he had the Buddhist establishment on his side which probably helped him to reunite the empire which he did to cause in 589 when he had conquered the Chen dynasty in the south thereby getting reunification after three and a half centuries of division but emperor Wen was also a shrewd politician this is empire I apologize for the very crude maps but you get it just to give you an idea as soon as emperor Wen had come to the throne he issued an edict obliging everyone in his realm to donate a small coin to the Buddha to mitigate the agonies of emperor Wu of the northern Zhou in hell so emperor Wen accomplished what in Europe the western or eastern Roman emperors and also all later emperors such as Charles Manier they were down to Napoleon failed to achieve that is political unity and I'm not going to talk about Brexit now but in addition to the help he had from Buddhism there were of course many fold other reasons why emperor Wen succeeded with his reunification above the geography in the center of the Roman empire the Indian sea which even although called Mare Nostrum fostered political and cultural diversification and the largest mountain chain of the continent the Alps were also run through the middle of the Roman empire that was different in China with its vast Korean land mass in the great plains in the middle but a major reason that the unification in China was successful and not in Europe was I believe that China writes differently in Rome several systems of script existed side by side Latin and Greek but also somewhere still the hieroglyphs or northern Semitic scripts and as the empire disintegrated the Roman Empire various new languages developed gems in this fascinating mosaic of European culture there were written in phonetic scripts mostly with Latin alphabet but these writings these literatures could only be read and understood by someone who had first learned that particular language not so in China there was only one a logographic script system its words could be read irrespective of their pronunciation and that system underwent only little changes within two thousand years this is a fragment of a Confucian classical text written about 1900 years ago and this is a Buddhist text written in 1093 AD in the famous function depository near Beijing, south of Beijing more than 100 years 900 years ago and this here is a stone tablet written in 2001 on which the historic significance of the valley with the engraved diamond sutra which we saw briefly is explained here the full arsenal of modern punctuation is used periods, comas, brackets and Arab numbers, two types of brackets and so on but basically and also used here are the abbreviated characters which have been introduced into China since the 1950s which they differ as you all know from the old ones mainly in that the number of strokes is reduced they differ orthographically so to speak but basically that means lexically the characters are the same as on the earlier stone tablets which we saw 1800 years ago or 900 years ago that means somebody who can read who can read this and these as we know are more than a billion people he can after some practice I have to admit some practice is needed but basically he can still read these two scripts up to 2000 years ago and this is not the case in Europe as we all know we cannot read texts which were written 2000 years ago and we cannot even read most of the texts which were written today if they were written 200 kilometers away I mean unless you have learned the language but the literate Chinese can also read the people's daily in this title in cursive script up there was written by Mao Zedong and this is another example that shows how Chinese characters are imbued with a potency which transcends the utilitarian function as a graphic code they are more than a graphic code in the beginning we saw the woman praying in front of the character Buddha the Buddha here is written and in the writing in the written character the Buddha is present in his name this makes possible this personal report between the supplicant and him and in the secular sphere it is the writer himself who is present in his written handwritten characters here it is Mao with his handwriting he guarantees the validity of everything that is ever printed in this newspaper and he establishes a personal report between him and every reader with his written characters Mao fosters social coherence the fact that China writes differently is a condition for its cultural political and social coherence that coherence is unique in world history it is awesome thank you