Assistant Professor Buddhist Studies Dr. Rafal Felbur

My scholarly interests focus on the intellectual, cultural, and social dynamics of the encounter between India and China in the first millennium CE. This encounter was arguably one of most extensive, complex, and consequential processes of cross-cultural interaction and transcultural formation in premodern times. It profoundly and enduringly impacted the Sinitic world on every level, from that of material practice and everyday ritual, through language and literature, economy and political organization, to cosmological conceptions of individual and collective meaning. In my scholarship I focus primarily on the textual evidence for these historical processes—translations of Indic Buddhist texts into Chinese, commentaries, bibliographic works, indigenous polemical and exegetical tracts, and official documents—all of which testify to the activity on Chinese soil of the Buddhist monk and nun: at times maligned, at times extolled, but, despite the ideal of monastic withdrawal, never idle. While new source materials continue to be identified, mainly in the collections from Dunhuang, the availability of novel digital tools and methods means that documents long known to scholarship can now be reexamined in a fresh light, an approach I apply in my work. At HCTS I teach thematic courses on various aspects of Buddhism between India and China, as well as reading seminars on primary materials.