Entre Nous: Max Deeg lifting the fog on Nalanda

January 27, 2016

Second seminar in Entre Nous series for Spring 2016 was a presentation of Dr. Max Deeg‘s ongoing work. It was held at interim campus on Monday, January 18, 2016. Deeg is currently a Scholar-in-Residence with School of Historical Studies at Nalanda University. The title for his talk was: “Fog on Nalanda – and how to lift it”

In the talk, Max Deeg presented some of the problems which he encountered during his ongoing work on the Magadha chapters in Xuanzang’s Xiyu ji (Records of the Western Regions). He gave detailed examples from his in-progess translation of the text, and demonstrated how the weaving together of textual sources – without the necessary contextualization and without archaeological evidence – has created a pseudo-history of Nalanda which reaches back to the time of the Buddha and Asoka. He also showcased how this narrative fabric can be disentangled for the sake of a much shorter history of Nalanda.

Entre Nous: Max Deeg lifting the fog on Nalanda

Entre Nous (“Between Us”) is a forum for critical but friendly conversations during which members of the university community (faculty, students, and other interested members) present work-in-progress related to the study of culture and nature broadly conceived. Talks are for approximately 30 minutes followed by discussion.

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