King’s College London – Buddhist Studies Research Seminars

King’s College London

Buddhist Studies Research Seminars

(2016-17)

Room VWB 3.01 at 5.00pm

Theology and Religious Studies

Virginia Woolf Building

22 Kingsway, London WC2B 6NR

Friday 14 Oct 2016

Tristram Riley-Smith (University of Cambridge)

Buddhist God-Makers and their Gods: An Anthropology of Art

Abstract

Tristram Riley-Smith is Director of Research in Politics & International Studies, and Associate Fellow at the Centre for Science & Policy, at Cambridge. He studied Social Anthropology, undertaking doctoral and post-doctoral research in Nepal and Thailand, making the film Birth of a Buddha. He spent thirty years in Government Service, being posted to the British Embassy in Washington DC in 2002. His portrait of the USA – The Cracked Bell: America and the Afflictions of Liberty was published in 2010. Tristram was appointed RCUK’s External Champion for the Partnership in Conflict, Crime and Security Research (PaCCS) in 2013.

In 1979-80, Tristram Riley-Smith conducted ethnographic research among Buddhist artists in the Kathmandu Valley, exploring the beliefs and practices associated with god-sculptures. In 1984, he travelled to Thailand – moving from a world of Tantric ‘Vajrayana’ Buddhism to that of Theravada Buddhism, making the film Birth of a Buddha. His focus was on the cultural life of the statues – the social and symbolic value applied to these objects. He encountered the impact of tourism on traditional art as well as the relationship between Buddhism and older belief systems. He has made more recent visits to the Himalayan kingdom of Mustang and to Japan (where, this year, he conducted the Okaidan Meguri rite, walking a dark tunnel beneath the shrine-room to reach the ‘key of paradise’ with its secret Buddha beyond.