Projects

This project seeks to rethink the history of modern Chinese thought by providing the first ever study of the academic discipline of U+201Cethnic minority philosophiesU+201D in the PeopleU+2019s Republic of China. It will focus on the much neglected relation between the imported categories of U+201CphilosophyU+201D and U+201CreligionU+201D and conceptions of ethnicity in twentieth-century and contemporary Chinese thought. The field of ethnic ...

My research project concerns the formation of monastic networks in provincial China during the Tang Dynasty (618U+2013907), focusing primarily on the Buddhist traditions of Chan (better known in the West by the equivalent Japanese term U+201CZenU+201D), Vinaya (monastic code), and Esotericism, which have yet to be explored as a series of related regional movements. I investigate the dissemination of these traditions in the context of the ...

The Buddhist Tiantai school was different from all other schools of Chinese Buddhism, as it remained confined

to the Tiantai Mountains, while other schools spread over all of China. I will demonstrate that the Tiantai

school's dedication to this area resulted from the devotion to the school founder, Zhiyi, who chose the Tiantai

Mountains as the site for his school.

This project will investigate how modern Chinese Islamic thinkers accommodated the novel category of U+201CreligionU+201D and renegotiated the position of Islam in twentieth-century and contemporary China by studying the complex relations between the transition from empire to nation-state, the emergence of the discipline of religious studies, and the repositioning of spirituality over and against secular politics.

The research project studies the institutional organisation of Buddhist nunneries in a Chinese and in an international context. The focus lies on the attitude of nunneries towards tradition and present-day reality, as well as on their international role based on this attitude. The project aims at providing a scientifically well based research of the institutional position of nunneries within Buddhism.

In the early twentieth century of China, Buddhism was integrated in economic, political and cultural developments. On the basis of Chinese Buddhist magazines, a research into the function of Buddhism in ChinaU+2019s society and national renaissance can answer the basic question of how the social position of Buddhism developed in the first forty years of the twentieth century.