Project

Imagining the Dharma: Metaphor as Pedagogy in Two Gandhari Sutras of the Robert Senior Collection

Program

The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowships in Buddhist Studies

Department

Asian Languages and Literature

Location

the Asian Studies/Religion Program, Cornell University

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, scholars have laid the groundwork of Gandharan Buddhist Studies by establishing an effective model for the analysis of newly discovered Gandhari manuscripts. This now allows for secondary level research to take the field into new territory. My project combines a critical and comparative study of an unpublished Gandhari manuscript with a study of the pedagogical function of metaphor in early Buddhist literature, thereby contributing to our knowledge of Gandharan Buddhism and the Gandhari language while at the same time expanding the scope of the field. I intend to publish the philological study as a volume in the Gandharan Buddhist Texts Series, and the study of metaphor and pedagogy as an article in a religious studies journal.