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by The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford
The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford podcast features faculty, graduate students, visiting speakers, and alumni in conversation with Miles Osgood and Leah Chase on the history, philosophy, and practice of Buddhism. Interviews are intended to be both academic and accessible: topics range from scholarly publications and insights to personal journeys and reflections.Interview videos are posted on YouTube, @thehocenterforbuddhiststudies. For more information about our events, speakers, and research, visit buddhiststudies.stanford.edu.
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- 2 weeks ago41 min
Travelogue: The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas
At the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah, California, we talk to professors, monastics, and laypeople about the acquisition of the historic property and the 600-mile bowing pilgrimage that inaugurated it, the transformative relationship between monasticism and education, and the importance of community as the City continues to evolve and expand.Interview by Leah ChaseThe music in this episode is by Rev. Heng Sure. "Bow Down, Turn Around" and "It's Called the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas," recorded in 2025 and 2007, respectively, are distributed by Dharma Radio Music. Additional music is by Blue Dot Sessions.
- May 1, 202646 min
Christian Luczanits: Mustang Art and the Myth of the Hidden Kingdom
Christian Luczanits talks about the eccentricities of early Buddhist art in the Mustang region of the Himalayas, the intellectual exchange that ran through the region long before its 15th-century kingdom, and the importance of documenting the manuscripts and sculptures of mountain monasteries in situ. Interview by Miles Osgood.
- Apr 1, 202648 min
Chiew Hui Ho: The Lives of Sūtras
Chiew Hui Ho talks about parasutraic texts in medieval China that chronicle devotion to specific sūtras, how these histories give us a picture of “Buddhism on the ground” distinct from that of miracle tales, and how scriptures like the Diamond Sūtra and Lotus Sūtra thereby develop lives and biographies of their own. Interview by Miles Osgood.
- Mar 1, 202635 min
Joshua Capitanio: The Work of the Scholar-Librarian
Joshua Capitanio talks about his graduate work on medieval Chinese Buddho-Daoism, how translation projects and “second book” arguments are valued inside and outside the professoriate, and what it takes to make a career transition to the university library. Interview by Miles Osgood.
- Feb 1, 202639 min
Book Notes: Meir Shahar, "Kings of Oxen and Horses"
Meir Shahar talks about the cult worship of the “Ox King” and the “Horse King” in China. Working at the intersection of scriptural studies and field research, Shahar connects the two animal gods back to Sākyamuni and Avalokiteśvara through locally transmitted manuscripts and their Indic sources, and he describes the unorthodox Buddhist priests in Guizhou Province who perform rituals for draft animals using these textual manuals.Kings of Oxen and Horses: Draft Animals, Buddhism, and Chinese Rural Religion (Columbia University Press, 2025). Interview by Miles Osgood.Talk from April 11, 2024 at HCBSS: Meir Shahar, “Buddhism and Chinese Rural Religion.” https://buddhiststudies.stanford.edu/events/meir-shahar-buddhism-and-chinese-rural-religion
- Jan 1, 202635 min
Book Notes: Adeana McNicholl, "Of Ancestors and Ghosts"
Adeana McNicholl talks about the misunderstood realm of the “pretas,” typically translated as the home of “hungry ghosts” but in fact host to an entire history of the ancestral “departed.” Following Indic "preta" narratives from their Brahmanical ritual origins through the construction of a Buddhist karmic cosmology, McNicholl considers the moral aesthetics of punishments designed to disgust, the gendered appetites of semi-divine seductresses, and the Sanskrit story that puts the whole chronology of "preta" literature back together.Of Ancestors and Ghosts: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2024). Interview by Miles Osgood.Adeana McNicholl, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University, is a scholar of Buddhism in premodern South Asia and in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Her first book, "Of Ancestors and Ghosts" (Oxford University Press, 2024), examines the historical development of the Buddhist "preta," or ghost, through narrative literature, asserting the importance of ghost stories for the creation of cosmological ideas. Her current book project, tentatively titled "Black Buddhism: A Religious History of Afro-Asian Solidarity," illustrates the importance of Buddhism for the conceptualization of Blackness within transnational anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-caste movements. Her other projects include a documentary reader on Black Buddhism, which she is co-editing with Ralph H. Craig III, and the Buddhism and Caste Initiative, co-directed with Nicholas Witkowski.
- Dec 1, 202528 min
Travelogue: Gil Fronsdal and the Insight Meditation Center
Gil Fronsdal talks about studying in Buddhist monasteries from Big Sur to Bangkok, founding the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, and creating an integrated Buddhist world culture through the practice of vipassana meditation.Gil Fronsdal is the founding teacher and a co-guiding teacher at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California and the Insight Retreat Center in Santa Cruz, California. He has been teaching since 1990. Gil was ordained as a Soto Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982 and at Theravada monk in Burma in 1985. Gil also has a PhD in Buddhist Studies from Stanford University.Interview by Leah Chase
- Nov 1, 202542 min
James Gentry: The Bodhisattva’s Body in a Pill
James Gentry talks about the thousand-year history of the Tibetan maṇi pill, back to its medieval origins in an age of Mongol invasions and epidemics, through an infusion of psychoactive fungi for experimental meditation in the 13th century, and as a shared token for today’s global Tibetan Buddhist diaspora.James Gentry is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford. He specializes in Tibetan Buddhism, with particular focus on the literature and history of its Tantric traditions. He is the author of Power Objects in Tibetan Buddhism: The Life, Writings, and Legacy of Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen, which examines the roles of Tantric material and sensory objects in the lives and institutions of Himalayan Buddhists. Before joining Stanford, James was on the faculty of the University of Virginia. He has also taught at Rangjung Yeshe Institute’s Centre for Buddhist Studies at Kathmandu University, where he served as director of its Master of Arts program in Translation, Textual Interpretation, and Philology. He has also served as editor-in-chief of the project 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, which aims to commission English translations of the Buddhist sūtras, tantras, and commentaries preserved in Tibetan translation and publish them in an online open-access forum.Interview by Miles Osgood.
About The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford
The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford podcast features faculty, graduate students, visiting speakers, and alumni in conversation with Miles Osgood and Leah Chase on the history, philosophy, and practice of Buddhism. Interviews are intended to be both academic and accessible: topics range from scholarly publications and insights to personal journeys and reflections.Interview videos are posted on YouTube, @thehocenterforbuddhiststudies. For more information about our events, speakers, and research, visit buddhiststudies.stanford.edu.
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