Research interests
I am a historian of religion broadly interested in the reception of Buddhism in China. This has led me to several topical research foci: the Chan (Zen) tradition in middle-period China (roughly the seventh to fourteenth centuries); apocryphal Buddhist scriptures written in China to look like translations of Indic originals; and the relationship between Buddhism and Daoism (especially, but not only, Chan and inner alchemy). Thematically, I am interested in embodiment, authority, gender and masculinity, agency and responsibility, work and labor, metaphor and figurative language.
Projects
I am the author of Discerning Buddhas: Authority, Agency, and Masculinity in Chan Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2025). With Megan Bryson, I co-edited the volume Buddhist Masculinities (Columbia University Press, 2023). For more information, see the “Books” tab.
My second book-length project, tentatively entitled Karma, Commerce, and Conscience: Layman Pang and the Problem of Debt in Chinese Buddhism, centers around a study and translation of “Layman Pang Unintentionally Lends Out Next-life Debts” (Pang jushi wu fang laisheng zhai 龐居士誤放來生債), a Yuan-period (1271–1368) zaju 雜劇 play in four acts. The play reworks the accumulated lore about the famous Tang-period Chan Buddhist layman Pang Yun 龐蘊 (740–808) to stage a remarkable answer to the question: what is the relationship between monetary and karmic debts, and how should they be resolved? Karma, Commerce, and Conscience explores how the play crystallizes centuries of Chan Buddhist innovation in formulating the moral responsibility of liberated persons in new ways that departed from longstanding assumptions about karma.
I also have a longstanding research interest in the relationship between Buddhism and Daoism in China, especially concerning questions of how Buddhists and Daoists in China have conceived of liberation in conversation with each other as bound up with particular (sometimes overlapping and sometimes competing) theories of embodiment and related bodily practices. I have published on related topics in my articles “Pregnant Metaphor” (2018), which examines centuries of negotiation between Buddhists and Daoists over the meaning of the term “embryo of sagehood” (shengtai 聖胎); and “Transcendents in Translation” (2023), which explores the long-term impact of translated and apocryphal Buddhist scriptures on the Chinese category xian 仙 (immortal or transcendent), usually associated with Daoism.