Stephanie Balkwill (UCLA)

In this talk, I will analyze the Empress Dowager’s program of state Buddhism and argue that like her famous contemporary in the South, Emperor Wu 武 (r. 502–549) of the Liang 梁 (502–557), she, too, positioned herself as a universal Buddhist monarch in medieval China. In so doing, I engage the question of how our understanding of Buddhist history changes when we put women into it and I propose a series of new questions, which, based in the study of women, serve to elevate our understanding of the ways in which Buddhism became a dominant social force in early medieval China.