Dear list members, Our next seminar will be at 6:00-7:30pm on Wednesday May 6 in Room S325 of the John Woolley Building, University of Sydney. We hope you can attend. Kind regards, AABS Executive What is 'Essential Buddhism'? The Winnowed Canon in South Asia The question of how a person should think and act to promote their self-awakening lies at the heart of Buddhism. The literature on a Buddhist's 'duty', their dharma, is, however, dauntingly large and varied. There is no single set of texts authoritative for all followers of Buddhism, although attempts are constantly made to conceive or promote a sanctioned corpus, a 'canon'. All essentializations of Buddhism were famously rejected by Nāgārjuna; but his own tradition, codified in the Sanskrit language, barely survives today. Why has so little of the Sanskritic corpus, once dominant in South Asia, been transmitted? This seminar focuses on an overlooked moment in the final days of Buddhism in India, when the last monasteries dispatched their libraries across the Himalayas. It explores, using hitherto unstudied material, an almost unthinkable scenario: that most of the 'canon' was deliberately thrown out. All works on the vinaya, which perpetuated the collapsing institution of celibate monasticism, were eliminated in this period. In their place, a mini-canon of scripture suitable for tantric Buddhist householders was propagated, which has defined the surviving Sanskritic tradition up to the present. Iain Sinclair (M. A.) specialises in the history, literature and art of South Asian Buddhism. He has studied the Sanskritic and Himalayan traditions of Buddhism for several years in Nepal, Hamburg and at Monash University. Recently he edited a peer-reviewed collection of articles in honour of Michael Allen, the distinguished Sydney-based anthropologist.