Notes on Contributors

Urs App studied psychology, philosophy, and religion at the universities of Freiburg, Kyoto, and Temple (Philadelphia, PA). He earned a Ph.D. in Chinese Buddhism from Temple University in 1989 and is currently senior researcher at the École Française d’ Extrême-Orient. From 1989 to 1999, he was professor of Buddhism and associate director of the International Research Institute for Zen Buddhism at Hanazono University, Kyoto. His research focuses on Buddhism (especially Zen), history of orientalism, history of the Western discovery of Asian religions, history of ideas in the East and West. He is a producer of video documentaries on Asian religions, and is author of, among other books, Master Yunmen (1994, 2018), The Birth of Orientalism (2010), Richard Wagner and Buddhism (2011), The Cult of Emptiness (2012), and Schopenhauer’s Compass (2014).

Ester Bianchi holds a Ph.D. in Indian and East-Asian Civilization from the University of Venice (co-tutorial Ph.D. in Sciences Religieuses received from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes). She is currently Associate Professor of Chinese Religions and Philosophy at the University of Perugia. Her research is centered on Sino-Tibetan Buddhism, Chinese Buddhist monasticism, and the revival of monastic discipline and of early meditation techniques in modern and contemporary Chinese Buddhism. She is the author of The Iron Statue Monastery, Tiexiangsi: A Buddhist Nunnery of Tibetan Tradition in Contemporary China (Firenze 2001) and of the first Italian translation of the Gaoseng Faxian zhuan (Faxian: un pellegrino cinese nell’ India del V secolo, Perugia, 2013).

Isabelle Charleux earned a Ph.D. from Sorbonne University in 1998, is director of research at CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research, Paris) and deputy director of the GSRL (Societies, Religions, and Laicities Group). Her research interests focus on Mongol material culture and religion (Mongolia and Inner Mongolia) and the pilgrimages of Mongols in Mongolia and abroad. She is the author of Nomads on Pilgrimage: Mongols on Wutaishan (China), 1800–1940 (Brill, 2015) and Temples et monastères de Mongolie-Intérieure (Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques & Institut National d’ Histoire de l’ Art, 2006).

Martino Dibeltulo Concu is a historian of Buddhism who holds a Ph.D. in Tibetan and Buddhist Studies from the University of Michigan. His area of expertise is the history and historiography of Chinese and Tibetan Buddhist relations. His current projects include a study of the modern incorporation of China into the global flow of European ideas about the Buddha and a monograph on how the study of Buddhist Tantra has influenced Enlightenment legacies and global thought during the modern age. He is the author of “Buddhism, Philosophy, History. On Eugène Burnouf’s Simple Sūtras” (Journal of Indian Philosophy, 2017), an investigation of magic, morality, and death in the European search for the historical Buddha.

Alison Denton Jones is an Associate of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. She is the author of Blood Drives, Bodhisattvas, and Blogs: Doing Buddhism in China’s 21st Century Urban Middle Class (forthcoming), which offers the first book-length study of an overlooked piece of China’s urban religious landscape: the vast number of white collar urbanites who practice Buddhism. She has also published two previous articles exploring the practice of Tibetan Buddhism by Han Chinese in the Reform Era. Her research focuses on cultural and institutional developments in Buddhism in contemporary Chinese societies, with particular focus on urban dynamics.

Weirong Shen holds a Ph.D. in Central Asian Science of Language and Culture from Bonn University (1998). Currently, he is Professor of Tibetan and Buddhist Philology at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of Leben und historische Bedeutung des ersten Dalai Lama dGe ’dun grub pa dpal bzang po (1391–1474)—Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der dGe lugs pa-Schule und der Institution der Dalai Lama (Styler Verlag, Institut Monumenta Serica, St. Augustin, Germany, 2002) and Philological Studies of Tibetan History and Buddhism (Shanghai Press of Chinese Classics, 2010).

Penghao Sun is a doctoral student in Inner Asia and Altaic Studies at Harvard University. His dissertation analyzes etiquette stories, normative debates, and chancellery translingual practice in order to explore the role of Mongols in the development of Tibetan historical consciousness from the thirteenth century on. His publications include an edition of the 1780 quadrilingual inscriptions in the Longxing Monastery and a study of four Tantric documents related to Pha Dam pa Sangs rgyas, both in Chinese.

Wei Wu is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Emory University. She received her Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University in 2017. She is currently preparing a book manuscript based on her dissertation “Indigenization of Tibetan Buddhism in Twentieth-Century China.” Her book project sheds light on cross-cultural and trans-regional religious transmission, specifically showing how the interaction between Tibetan Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism has influenced the religious landscape of modern China.

Fan Zhang is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology at Peking University (China). Her research concerns Tibetan studies, ethnic studies, the study of empire and civilization, and anthropological theory. She has carried out historical and ethnographical studies in Tibet, Sichuan, and Fujian. Her major publications include “Grass-root Officials in the Ideological Battlefield: Revaluation of the Study of the amban in Tibet” (2014), “Reorienting the Sacred and Accommodating the Secular: the History of Buddhism in China (rgya nag chos ’byung)” (2016), and “Transcendent Space, Mandala, and Our Holy Empire: Multiple Spatial Imaginations of Mount Wutai and Multiple Identifications in the 18th century” (2019, in Chinese).

Linghui Zhang holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia and is currently affiliated with the Chinese Academy of History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His dissertation project is situated in the field of tantric Buddhism and traces the discursive trajectory of the Mahāmudrā tradition from its origination in Indian Buddhist Tantra, through a formative process nourished by Indian and Tibetan post-tantric ethos, and finally to its systematic presentation as epitomized in the twelfth-century Tangut work Keypoints of Mahāmudrā as the Ultimate, compiled by a Xixia-based scholarly monk Dehui. Zhang’s work focuses on how the Keypoints juxtaposes two soteriological modes of the visionary and the embodied and bridges them in the experiential domain of non-conceptual realization, analyzing it against the multiple philosophical and practical threads from Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Tantra and Mahāyāna scholasticism.