Buddhist Transformations and Interactions

“This study holds substantial and innovative contributions that explore little-known but important topics in Buddhist studies and Chinese religious studies. A remarkably well-constructed and organized collection, each chapter reads like a node in a vast and ongoing network of themes, and promises to become the starting point for new and exciting lines of research. This book is a most valuable resource for scholars in Buddhist studies and Chinese religious studies.” —Fabio Rambelli, University of California, Santa Barbara

“This book is marked by very high levels of technical Buddhological knowledge and critical research. The list of its contributors reads like a ‘who’s who’ in the fields of Buddhist and Asian Studies. The volume effectively covers large areas of eastern and southern Asian history, while pursuing pointed interest in Buddhist-informed cultures which interacted with each other over millennia and exchanged a multitude of ideas, images, scriptures, and rituals. This book is an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of Buddhist and Asian culture in many of its previously uncovered aspects and nuances.”  —Tanya Storch, University of the Pacific

“This volume demonstrates how actively Buddhist ideas and ideologies intersected with transregional polities and politics. We see in the studies here the importance of the multidirectional transmissions of Buddhist traditions: the usual route of India to China to Japan is here problematized by the recognition that at particular moments the influences were substantially interactive and bilateral. Forte would be very pleased by these border crossings, as his own work did so much to make the cosmopolitanism of Tang Buddhism so vividly real for us.”  —Daniel Boucher, Cornell University

“The work of Antonio Forte was a unique combination of tremendous intellectual creativity and profoundly rigorous scholarship that spanned the geographical and chronological boundaries of Chinese, Indian, and Japanese Buddhism. The impressive originality, depth, and range of the global scholarship in this volume honors, celebrates, and reflects the very qualities that define Forte’s legacy.” —D. Max Moerman, Barnard College, Columbia University

“A remarkable collection of essays by eminent Buddhist scholars and Sinologists who have, in one way or another, been strongly influenced by Antonino Forte’s methods, ideas, and personality.” —Bernard R. Faure, Columbia University