Miles Osgood talks to Pia Brancaccio about the Buddhist cave monasteries of Western Deccan, the inter-continental exchange of "Maritime Buddhism" along the "Cotton Road," and the competition between Buddhism and Shaivism at the end of the first millennium C.E.

Pia Brancaccio is currently a Professor of Indian Art and Archaeology at the Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” in Italy and at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Her research focuses on early Buddhist art and cross-cultural exchange in South Asia, with a regional emphasis on the visual cultures of ancient Gandhāra (Pakistan) and the Deccan Plateau (India). She has published extensively on the Buddhist caves in the Western Deccan, including a monograph, The Buddhist Caves at Aurangabad (2010), and the edited volume Living Rock (2013). She is currently working on the MAK Project (Mapping Ancient Kṛṣṇagiri) at the Kanheri caves in Maharashtra, India, which aims to produce the first complete archaeological and epigraphic documentation of the site. She has also been a longstanding collaborator with the ISMEO-Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan and has written on architecture, visual narratives, artistic workshops, and the multicultural fabric of Buddhism in Gandhāra. She co-edited the book Gandharan Buddhism: Art, Archaeology (2006).

Miles Osgood talks to Professor Stephen Bokenkamp about his fieldwork in China after the Cultural Revolution, how to better understand the original encounter between Daoism and Buddhism in the 2nd to 6th centuries C.E., and what Daoist and Buddhist Studies can learn from one another today.

Stephen R. Bokenkamp (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1986) specializes in the study of medieval Chinese Daoism, with a special emphasis on its literatures and its relations with Buddhism. He is author of Early Daoist Scriptures，Ancestors and Anxiety，A Fourth-century Daoist Family: the Zhen’gao, as well as over forty articles and book chapters on Daoism and literature. Among his awards are the Guggenheim Award for the Translation of a medieval Daoist text, a National Endowment for the Humanities Translation grant and the invitation to present the Xuyun and Yanfu lectures for the Philosophy Department of Beijing University. In addition to his position at Arizona State, he has taught at Indiana University, Stanford University, and short courses for graduate students at Beijing, Princeton and Fudan Universities. He was also part of the National 985 project at the Institute of Religious Studies, Sichuan University from 2006-2013.

Miles Osgood talks to Ven. Bhikkhunī Dhammadinnā about the journey of her research in relation to the historical transmission of Buddhist texts, the process of integrating her two lives as an academic and monastic, and the relevance of Buddhism’s “two truths” doctrine in the present day.

Born in Italy in 1980, Bhikkhunī Dhammadinnā went forth as a monastic in the Theravāda Buddhist tradition of Sri Lanka in 2012. She studied Indology, Indo-Iranian philology, and Tibetology at the University of Naples "L’Orientale," at the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University in Tokyo, and at the Institute for Research in Humanities at Kyoto University, receiving her doctorate in 2010 with a dissertation on the Khotanese "Book of Zambasta" and the formative phases of bodhisattva Mahāyāna ideology in Khotan in the fifth and sixth centuries. Her scholarly work focuses on early Buddhist Sūtra and Vinaya literature as well as the doctrinal and historical development of Buddhist meditative traditions in India. She is the co-founder and director of the Āgama Research Group (established in 2012) and an associate research professor in the Department of Buddhist Studies of the Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts in Taiwan. Bhikkhunī Dhammadinnā also serves as a Buddhist minister with the Italian government through the Italian Buddhist Union.