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The Tocharian Buddha and the Local Demons | Monika Zin

Speaker: Monika Zin, Professor, Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities Video Segments: 00:00 Start 00:00:22 Welcome introduction: Osmund Bopearachchi Ph.D | Visiting Professor, UC Berkeley 00:06:58 Speaker: Monika Zin, Professor, Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities The discovery of the cave monasteries of Kucha, as well as the manuscripts and inscriptions found in these caves, have opened a window into the lost Tocharian culture. However, the decipherment of the language and the huge amount of material discovered cannot hide the fact that our knowledge of the area is actually very limited, because it is centred around the Buddhist monastery complexes in the region. The material at hand indicates the presence of a rather archaic Buddhism and the intentional borrowing of elements from South Asian culture, therefore these features of the local culture are considered essential and have dominated research. But after more than a century of scholarship on the Buddhist remains time may be ripe to widen the scope of our studies and to include aspects of Tocharian culture less obvious and less easily accessible, which nevertheless may be equally substantial. By recognizing large areas as hitherto unexplored, we can keep an open mind for future paths of research on Kucha, its cultural and religious environment. Until today, it has, for example, not been possible to determine how those demons represented like Indian deities in the paintings of Kucha were actually understood by their contemporary beholders; perhaps we should no longer think of the local culture and everyday practices as focused exclusively on Buddhism. Professor Monika Zin is the head of the research group “Buddhist Murals of Kucha on the Northern Silk Road” at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig. She studied literature, art history and Indology in Krakow and Munich, where she taught the art of South and Central Asia for 25 years. She is the author of books on Ajanta (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003, Delhi: Munshiram, 2003) and Kanaganahalli (Delhi: Aryan, 2018). In 2022, she published Saṃsāracakra, The Wheel of Rebirths in the Indian Tradition (Delhi: Dev), which she co-authored with Dieter Schlingloff. Zin has contributed to numerous studies on Buddhist narrative art, ranging from Kucha in Central Asia to Borobudur on Java. For the series “Leipzig Kucha Studies”, which she co-edits with Eli Franco, she has hitherto authored a study on the representations of the First Council in Kucha paintings (LKS 1) and the monograph Representations of the Parinirvāṇa Story Cycle in Kucha (LKS 2).