Carmen Meinert talks at the University of California, Berkeley

On February 26, 2021, Carmen Meinert gave this year's prestigious Khyentse Lecture at the Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Just recently the webcast of her talk entitled "Sacred Space and Time: Perspectives of Tantric Buddhist Materials from the Tangut Empire (11th to 13th C.)" was made online available here.

The Khyentse Lecture, delivered once a year at the famous Center for Buddhist Studies, attracted a large audience world-wide. In her talk, Carmen Meinert presented the BuddhistRoad Project as well as the most recent findings of her own research on Tantric ritual practice in Eastern Central Asia under Tangut rule (ca. 1138–1227). She presented material, visual, and textual sources which proof the continuation of performance of Tantric ritual practice at the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, particularly in the famous Cave 465, the sole cave with Tantric Buddhist iconography in Dunhuang, far beyond the Tibetan dominion of the region. The transmission of the Tantric teachings, facilitated thanks to Tangut imperial patronage of Tibetan masters, was for the first time in history provided in translations from Tibetan to Chinese language. Carmen Meinert also applied the concept of transcendence-immanence distinction, developed in the Bochum research consortium KHK Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia in Europe to her Central Asian Buddhist materials.

A longer version of her talk will be published this year in: Buddhism in Central Asia II: Practice and Rituals, Visual and Material Transfer, edited by Yukiyo Kasai and Henrik H. Sørensen, Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2021.