Home > T.H. Barrett (SOAS) - Lincoln Memorial Lecture in Chinese Studies - The Rise of Printing and the Rise of Chan Buddhism: A Hidden Connection?

 Printer Version

T.H. Barrett (SOAS) - Lincoln Memorial Lecture in Chinese Studies - The Rise of Printing and the Rise of Chan Buddhism: A Hidden Connection?

Date: 3/13/2008 to 3/13/2008 from 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Location: Founders Room, Alumni Association, Time TDB
Host Department: Asian Studies

The lecture will try to set out a provisional narrative of the factors affecting printing up until the end of the Tang dynasty. After completing this account, consideration of what happened next, in the early decades of the tenth century, has suggested that we need to look carefully at the political and social factors prevailing at that point to understand the widespread acceptance of printing thereafter. And once again, we need to look very carefully at religious materials to get some picture of what was going on, even if paradoxically they have nothing to do with printing at all.

Detailed Information
T. H. Barrett is Professor of East Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Department of the Study of Religions in London, England. He has published Li Ao: Buddhist, Taoist, or Neo-Confucian (1992), Taoism under the T’ang (1996), and a number of other studies. His next book, The Woman Who Discovered Printing is to be published by Yale in London by the end of March, 2008.