Allison Aitken receives Fulbright Scholarship

palace near water

Allison Aitken, PhD candidate in South Asian Studies, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to engage in research in India in 2019. As a Fulbright-Nehru PhD Student Researcher in India, she will undertake research in support of her dissertation, “Not One, Not Many, and No Final Ground: Śāntarakṣita’s Mereological Anti-realism as Metaphysical Infinitism,” which takes up the Madhyamaka philosophy of the eighth-century Indian Buddhist thinker, Śāntarakṣita, undertaking a rational reconstruction of Śāntarakṣita’s thought utilizing conceptual resources from contemporary metaphysics. Her study centers on Śāntarakṣita’s anti-essentialist neither-one-nor many argument as presented in his Ornament for the Middle Way (Madhyamakālaṃkāra). With the support of the Fulbright Scholarship, she will take up residence at the Institute of Higher Buddhist Studies in Sikkim, India, a Buddhist monastic institute belonging to the Zurmang Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, and will focus on Tibetan and Sanskrit primary sources central to her project.