Research interests
I am a historian of religion broadly interested in the reception of Buddhism in China. This has led me to several topical research foci: the Chan (Zen) tradition in Tang- and Song-dynasty China (especially the Song); apocryphal Buddhist scriptures written in China to look like translations of Indic originals; and the relationship between Buddhism and Daoism (especially, but not only, Chan and inner alchemy). Thematically, I am interested in embodiment, authority, gender and masculinity, agency and responsibility, work and labor, metaphor and figurative language.
Books
With Megan Bryson, I co-edited the volume Buddhist Masculinities (Columbia University Press, 2023).
My first monograph, Discerning Buddhas: Authority, Agency, and Masculinity in Chan Buddhism (forthcoming 2024), explores how Chan Buddhists made the unprecedented claim to a level of religious authority on par with the historical Buddha Śākyamuni and how, in doing so, they came to grips with the question of what it means to be a buddha in China. This claim helped propel the Chan tradition to dominance of elite monastic Buddhism during the Song period (960–1279), licensed an outpouring of Chan literature to be treated as equivalent to scripture, and changed the way Chinese Buddhists understood their own capacity for religious authority in relation to the historical Buddha and the Indian homeland of Buddhism. But the claim itself also raised challenging questions. According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha was easily recognizable by the "marks of a great man" that adorned his body, while the same could not be said for Chan masters in the Song. So how exactly could one recognize a Chan master as a buddha? The Chan tradition never arrived at a single conclusive answer to this question. Instead, the question animated a variety of Chan rituals, institutional norms, literary practices, and visual cultures. This book pays special attention to themes of gender and masculinity in the construction of ideal Chan mastery as a form of buddhahood, as well as to the overlooked role that tropes of sovereignty played in discussions of the ideal Chan master’s buddha-like authority and agency.
I have published on themes related to Discerning Buddhas (but mostly complementing rather than overlapping with it) in several articles and a book chapter: “Becoming Chinese Buddhas” (2019); “Ritual Authority and the Problem of Likeness in Chan Buddhism” (2022, directly overlapping a little with the book, but mostly not in the book); “Possessing Enlightenment” (2023); and “How Chan Masters Became ‘Great Men’” (2023, directly overlapping with the book). Please see the “Publications” tab for more information.
Other projects
My second book-length project, tentatively entitled Embodying Liberation: Metaphor, Metaphysics, and Materiality Between Chinese Buddhism and Daoism, explores how Buddhists and Daoists in China have conceived of liberation in conversation with each other as bound up with particular (sometimes overlapping and sometimes competing) theories of embodiment and related bodily practices. I have published on related topics in my articles “Pregnant Metaphor” (2018), which examines centuries of negotiation between Buddhists and Daoists over the meaning of the term “embryo of sagehood” (shengtai 聖胎); and “Transcendents in Translation” (2023), which explores the long-term impact of translated and apocryphal Buddhist scriptures on the Chinese category xian 仙 (immortal or transcendent), usually associated with Daoism.
Another long-term book-length project, tentatively entitled Labor and Leisure in Chan Buddhism, probes an apparent paradox in Song-dynasty Chan Buddhism. On one hand, Chan Buddhists presented their approach to spiritual liberation as a simple, labor-saving technique for quickly finding in enlightenment a “place of rest.” On the other hand, perhaps more than any other Buddhist tradition, Chan Buddhists emphasized the virtue of hard work, among other things by elaborating a huge mythology of legendary Chan masters personally engaging in heavy farm labor. I ask: what was at stake for Chan Buddhists and their lay interlocutors in these two seemingly opposite ideals? The project traces themes of debt, obligation, productivity and idleness across a variety of textual and visual contexts related to Chan in Song-dynasty China.
For my take on questions of agency and responsibility in medieval Chinese Buddhism, revolving around analysis of the apocryphal scripture Lengyan jing 楞嚴經 (AKA Śūrangama Sūtra) and its reception by Chan Buddhists, see my article “Possessing Enlightenment” (2023). This article dovetails with my examination in Discerning Buddhas of how Song-period Chan Buddhists conceptualized liberated agency.