Le Centre d’études bouddhistes de la Fondation de la famille Robert H. N. Ho (Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies) de l’Université de Toronto invite à soumettre des propositions de communication pour une conférence marquant le dixième anniversaire du Centre, prévue les 6 et 7 novembre 2026.
La conférence a comme but de faire du passage du temps lui-même une occasion de réflexion savante. Les présentations explorant le temps et la temporalité à travers les traditions bouddhistes sont les bienvenues.
La date limite pour envoyer sa proposition de communication est le 15 septembre 2026.
Pour plus de détails, voir ci-dessous :
More than a mere marker of elapsed duration, this 10-year milestone provides a structured return to the past and allows us to resituate the present and anticipate futures. These questions of temporal orientation—of how past, present, and future are constituted, experienced, and brought into relation—also lie at the heart of Buddhist thought, practice, and history.
Buddhist traditions have theorized the fleeting moment and the continuity of karmic causation; imagined vast cosmological cycles and ages of Dharma decline; organized communal life through ritual, calendrical, and monastic rhythms; and developed practices concerned with memory, rebirth, death, and the final moment of consciousness. Buddhist texts, material culture, institutions, and communities also negotiate relationships between past and future: preserving and reconstructing lineages, ritually reactivating inherited traditions, responding to historical rupture and modernity, and imagining ecological, technological, and religious futures.
Possible topics might include, but are by no means limited to:
momentariness, impermanence, causality, and relationships among past, present, and future;
karma, continuity, rebirth, memory, and anticipation;
cosmological cycles, past and future Buddhas, prophecy, and Dharma decline;
ritual calendars, monastic schedules, festivals, astrology, and auspicious time;
meditation, embodiment, ageing, dying, mourning, and the final moment;
narrative time, hagiography, lineage, revelation, and the transmission of the past;
historical consciousness, modernity, revival, rupture, and competing conceptions of Buddhist history;
material and visual temporalities, including relics, images, architecture, ruins, restoration, repetition, and decay;
ecological time, extinction, technological change, and Buddhist futures.
We welcome proposals for individual presentations of 15–20 minutes engaging any Buddhist tradition, region, or historical period, and encourage approaches from religious studies, philosophy, history, anthropology, art history, literature, archaeology, medicine, and related fields. Comparative and interdisciplinary contributions are particularly welcome where they illuminate the distinct ways Buddhist temporalities are produced and inhabited. In keeping with the Centre’s role as a community connecting students, alumni, faculty, and scholars of Buddhist Studies, we particularly welcome contributions from scholars at all career stages. As a celebration of the Centre’s first decade, the conference will provide a warm and collegial occasion for scholars, students, alumni, and friends of HCBS to reconnect, renew relationships, and build new connections across generations and fields of Buddhist Studies.
Submission Guidelines:
Please submit a 300-word paper proposal for a 15–20-minute presentation and a short bio (max. 100 words) as a single Word doc or PDF attachment by Tuesday, September 15, 2026 to the conference organizers Sinae Kim and SeungJung Kim at buddhiststudies@utoronto.ca. Please be sure to include your name, your presentation title, institutional affiliation, and email address at the top of the proposal. Contributors will be notified about whether their abstract is accepted by Friday, September 25, 2026. The conference will also include longer presentations by invited speakers. Panels will be assembled by the organizers based on the accepted submissions and invited speaker presentations. The final program will be posted on our website.
This conference will be held in person at the University of Toronto’s St. George campus with the venue to be announced. Limited funding may be available to support travel for selected participants; further details will be provided upon acceptance.
Organizers:
Dr. SeungJung Kim, Director of the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto
Dr. Sinae Kim, Postdoctoral Fellow in Buddhist Studies, University of Toronto