Home Annual Meeting Call for Papers Consultations Religions in Chinese and Indian Cultures

Religions in Chinese and Indian Cultures: A Comparative Perspective PDF-NOTE: Internet Explorer Users, right click the PDF Icon and choose [save target as] if you are experiencing problems with clicking. Print

Call for Proposals

The Bhagavad Gita is among the most influential Indian religious scriptures, and it is also one of the most translated texts in the world. Given its prominence within India and beyond, the text has been the subject of constant scholarly studies in the West, quite often in the context of fruitful comparisons with Western religious and philosophical texts. However, there has been little, if any, effort in the scholarly community to engage the Bhagavad Gita from perspectives arising out of Chinese texts. We are soliciting papers that draw connections between the ideas presented in the Bhagavad Gita and certain key notions in core Chinese texts. We have already prearranged the panel but are still open to additional proposals on this subject.

Mission

This Consultation proposes to address two significant gaps in the current scholarship on Chinese and Indian religious traditions. The first gap is on historical scholarship; there has been inadequate scholarly attention paid to how Indian Buddhism — and its central Asian variants — introduced new issues and imaginations to the Chinese people and how the Chinese managed to appropriate the alien tradition into their own intellectual milieu, hence deeply enriching and reshaping the indigenous Chinese culture. Second, we also seek to redirect some of the attention of the comparative study of religion and philosophy away from the default West-centered approach. India and China are profoundly important civilizations, both historically and contemporarily. Despite the historical connection of Buddhism, the differences in their cultural products — whether religious, linguistic, philosophical, artistic, or material — are so striking that comparing them would highlight the true richness, plurality, and diversity of human creativity and cultural productivity.

Anonymity of Review Process

Proposer names are visible to Chairs but anonymous to Steering Committee Members.

Questions?

Tao Jiang
Rutgers University
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Lancaster University
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Method of Submission

 

This website contains archived issues of Religious Studies News published online from March 2010 to May 2013, and PDF versions of print editions published from Winter 2001 to October 2009.

This site also contains archived issues of Spotlight on Teaching (May 1999 to May 2013) and Spotlight on Theological Education (March 2007 to March 2013).

For current issues of RSN, beginning with the October 2013 issue, please see here.


Banner