The Transnational Cult of Mount Wutai explores the pan-East Asian significance of sacred Mount Wutai from the Northern Dynasties to the present.

The northern Chinese mountain range of Mount Wutai has been a preeminent site of international pilgrimage for over a millennium. Home to more than one hundred temples, the entire range is considered a Buddhist paradise on earth, and has received visitors ranging from emperors to monastic and lay devotees. Mount Wutai explores how Qing Buddhist rulers and clerics from Inner Asia, including Manchus, Tibetans, and Mongols, reimagined the mountain as their own during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wen-Shing Chou examines a wealth of original source materials in multiple languages and media--many never before published or translated—such as temple replicas, pilgrimage guides, hagiographic representations, and panoramic maps. She shows how literary, artistic, and architectural depictions of the mountain permanently transformed the site's religious landscape and redefined Inner Asia's relations with China. Chou addresses the pivotal but previously unacknowledged history of artistic and intellectual exchange between the varying religious, linguistic, and cultural traditions of the region. The reimagining of Mount Wutai was a fluid endeavor that proved central to the cosmopolitanism of the Qing Empire, and the mountain range became a unique site of shared diplomacy, trade, and religious devotion between different constituents, as well as a spiritual bridge between China and Tibet. A compelling exploration of the changing meaning and significance of one of the world's great religious sites, Mount Wutai offers an important new framework for understanding Buddhist sacred geography.

The rise of Spatial Humanities has spurred a digital revolution in the field of Chinese studies, especially in the study of religion. Based on years of data compilation and analysis of religious sites, this book explores the formation of Regional Religious Systems (RRS) in Greater China in unprecedented scope and depth. It addresses quantitatively the enduring historical and contemporary issues of China’s deep-rooted regionalism and spatially variegated cultural and religious landscape. A range of topics are explored: theoretical discussions of the concept of RRS; case studies of regional and local religious institutions; the formation of local cults and pilgrimage network; and the spread of religious networks to overseas Chinese communities and the Bon religion in Tibet. The book also considers long-standing challenges of researching with spatial data for humanities and social science research, such as data collection, integration, spatial analysis, and map creation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, Chinese Studies, Digital Humanities, Human Geography and Sociology.

Today, most Uyghurs are Muslims. For centuries, however, Uyghurs were Buddhists. By around 1000 CE, they, like many of their neighbors, had decisively turned toward the Dharma, and a golden age of Uyghur Buddhism flourished under the Mongol empire. Dwelling along the Silk Road in what is now northwestern China, they stood at the center of Buddhist Eurasia, linking far-flung regions and traditions. But as Muslim power grew, Uyghur Buddhists converted to Islam, rewriting their past and erasing their Buddhist history. This book presents the first comprehensive history of Buddhism among the Uyghurs from the ninth to the seventeenth century. Johan Elverskog traces how the Uyghurs forged their distinctive tradition, considering a variety of social, political, cultural, and religious contexts. He argues that the religious history of the Uyghurs challenges conventional narratives of the meeting of Buddhism and Islam, showing that conversion took place gradually and was driven by factors such as geopolitics, climate change, and technological innovation. Elverskog also provides a nuanced understanding of lived Buddhism, focusing on ritual practices and materiality as well as the religion’s entanglements with economics, politics, and violence. A groundbreaking history of Uyghur Buddhism, this book makes a compelling case for the importance of the Uyghurs in shaping the course of both Buddhist and Asian history.

Introduction: Thinking about religious space : an introduction to approaches / Jeanne Halgren Kilde -- Conceptualizing space and place : genealogies of change in the study of religion / Juan E. Campo -- Hermeneutics of space : sacred space / Michael J. Crosbie -- Urbanism and religious space / Paul-François Tremlett -- Shared space, or mixed? / Robert M. Hayden -- Decommissioning and reuse of liturgical architectures : historical processes and temporal dimensions / Andrea Longhi -- The impermanence of religious space : three approaches to change in the American religioscape / Jeanne Halgren Kilde -- Planetary identities : globalization, climate change and meaning-making practices / Whitney A. Bauman -- Whose place is it? Layers of community and meaning in the land of Shinto and power spots / Caleb Carter -- Religious place/space in premodern China / Wei-Cheng Lin -- National treasures vs. alien species : religious spaces, raccoons, and national identity in contemporary Japan / Barbara R. Ambros -- Visualizing Himalayan Buddhist sacred sites in 3D/VR : pedagogy and partnership / Lauren Leve and Bradley Erickson -- Form and function in the ancient synagogue : evidence from the second to seventh centuries in Palestine and the diaspora / Marilyn J. Chiat -- A little bit of evil : Masjid Kufa in Early Twelver Shi'ism / Najam Haider -- Mediated spaces of collective ritual : sacred selfies at the Hajj / Nadia Caidi and Mariam Karim -- (In)visible priorities : epigraphic power and identity at a Jordanian state mosque / David Simonowitz -- Exploration of religious spaces in Western Africa : combining approaches to understand spaces / Daniel Dei -- Religious spaces as tourist sites in Ghana / Alice Matilda Nsiah -- Sacred space in 19th century Cape Town : mosque, city, landscape and a radical empiricism of the spatial / Ozayr Saloojee -- Mapping the spiritual Baptist universe : black Atlantic cosmography and the spatiality of spirit in Trinidad and Tobago / Brendan Jamal Thornton -- The spaces of Roman religion and Christianity in late antiquity / Béatrice Caseau Chevallier -- Presence and performance : Orthodox spaces of the Eastern Roman Empire / Amy Papalexandrou -- Remnants of Israel : Jewish spaces and landscapes in medieval and early modern Europe / Jessica Renee Streit and Barry L. Stiefel -- the religious landscape and its architecture in contemporary Europe / Esteban Fernández-Cobián -- Pre-Columbian and indigenous religious spaces in Mesoamerica / Brent K.S. Woodfill -- Protestant architecture in Latin America / Rodrigo Vidal Rojas -- Roman Catholic sacred space / Leonard Norman Primiano -- Protestant spaces in North America / David R. Bains -- Eastern Orthodox spaces in America / Nicholas Denysenko -- Diasporic sacred spaces : the case of boundary making at an American Sufi shrine / Merin Shobhana Xavier -- Women's mosques : spaces to rethink gender and religious authority / Irum Shiekh -- Sites of miracles and other holy places : the Santuario de Chimayó as case study / Brett Hendrickson -- Situating the dead : cemeteries as material, symbolic, and relational space / Avril Madrell and Brenda Mathijssen -- Fundament and abyss : public religion at the Berlin Holocaust Memorial / David Lê.

The ERC-funded research project BuddhistRoad aims to create a new framework to enable understanding of the complexities in the dynamics of cultural encounter and religious transfer in pre-modern Eastern Central Asia. Buddhism was one major factor in this exchange: for the first time the multi-layered relationships between the trans-regional Buddhist traditions (Chinese, Indian, Tibetan) and those based on local Buddhist cultures (Khotanese, Uyghur, Tangut) will be explored in a systematic way. The second volume Buddhism in Central Asia II—Practice and Rituals, Visual and Materials Transfer based on the mid-project conference held on September 16th–18th, 2019, at CERES, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany) focuses on two of the six thematic topics addressed by the project, namely on "practices and rituals", exploring material culture in religious context such as mandalas and talismans, as well as “visual and material transfer”, including shared iconographies and the spread of ‘Khotanese’ themes.

North Korea’s Kŭmgangsan is one of Asia’s most celebrated sacred mountain ranges, comparable in fame to Mount Tai in China and Mount Fuji in Japan. Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan marks a paradigm shift in the research about East Asian mountains by introducing an entirely new field: autographic rock graffiti. The book details how late Chosŏn (ca. 1600–1900 CE) Korean elite travelers used Kŭmgangsan to demonstrate their high social status by carving inscriptions, naming sites, and joining the literary pedigree of visitors to renowned locales. Such travel practices show how social competition emerged in the spatial context of a landscape. Hence, Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan argues for an expansion of accepted historical narratives on travel and mountain space in premodern East Asia. Rather than interpreting pilgrimage routes as exclusively religious or tourist, in Kŭmgangsan’s case they were also an important site of collective memory. Embarking on a journey to Kŭmgangsan to view and contribute to its sites of memory was an endeavor that late Chosŏn Koreans hoped to achieve in their lives. Based on multidisciplinary research drawing on literary writings, court records, gazetteers, maps, songs, calligraphy, and paintings, Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan is the first historical study of this practice. It will appeal to scholars in fields ranging from East Asian history, literature, and geography, to pilgrimage studies and art history.

Over the last two decades, the study of graffiti has emerged as a bustling field, invigorated by increased appreciation for their historical, linguistic, sociological, and anthropological value and propelled by ambitious documentation projects. The growing understanding of graffiti as a perennial, universal phenomenon is spurring holistic consideration of this mode of graphic expression across time and space. Graffiti Scratched, Scrawled, Sprayed: Towards a Cross-Cultural Understanding complements recent efforts to showcase the diversity in creation, reception, and curation of graffiti around the globe, throughout history and up to the present day. reflecting on methodology, concepts, and terminology as well as spatial, social, and historical contexts of graffiti, the book's fourteen chapters cover ancient Egypt, Rome, Northern Arabia, Persia, India, and the Maya; medieval Eastern Mediterranean, Turfan, and Dunhuang; and contemporary Tanzania, Brazil, China, and Germany. As a whole, the collection provides a comprehensive toolkit for newcomers to the field of graffiti studies and appeals to specialists interested in viewing these materials in a cross-cultural perspective.

This volume explores the dissemination of the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya tradition in Tang China (618–907) in the context of the dispersal of the state bureaucracy throughout the empire and the changing centre–periphery dynamics. The tradition’s development in China during the Tang Dynasty has traditionally been associated with northern China, particularly the capital city of Chang’an, where Daoxuan (596–667), the de facto founder of the “vinaya school” in China, resided. This book explores the dissemination of Daoxuan’s followers and the subsequent growth of interrelated regional vinaya movements across the Tang regional landscape.

Sino-Tibetan Buddhism implies cross-cultural contacts and exchanges between China and Tibet. The ten case-studies collected in this book focus on the spread of Chinese Buddhism within a mainly Tibetan environment and the adaptation of Tibetan Buddhism among a Chinese-speaking audience throughout the ages.