Though many studies of contemporary Buddhist literature exist, such studies often limit their purview to canonised, ‘high-brow’ authors. In this article, I read Janwillem van de Wetering’s The Japanese Corpse, a detective novel, for how it portrays Zen Buddhism. I show that The Japanese Corpse portrays Zen as non-dualist and amoral: good and bad a…[Read more]

Over the course of the semester, we will organize three class debates. Debates between Confucians, Daoists, and Mohists, and, later on, Buddhists, were not uncommon in premodern China, and some of these are documented in the historical record. The purpose of these debates was to show that the religion in question was the best choice for the…[Read more]

This dataset was produced as part of the Research Workshop on China’s Local Gazetteers, Computerized Data Analysis and Visualization, held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin, August 1-19, 2016. Fulltext data from 11 local gazetteers (fangzhi 方志) was processed to find instances of religious buildings (temp…[Read more]

Syllabus for a graduate seminar on Chinese Religions at McMaster University Term II 2017-2018