Click here return to the Hualin main page.

Click here return to the Hualin E-Journal Vol 5.2 Table of Contents page.

 

Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 5.2 (2022): 295–311; https://dx.doi.org/10.15239/hijbs.05.02.11

Download full text PDF

 

How Zen Became Chan: Pre-modern and Modern Representations of a Transnational East Asian Buddhist Tradition

Marcel WERBIK
Jagiellonian University, Poland

The international conference ‘How Zen Became Chan: Pre-modern and Modern Representations of a Transnational East Asian Buddhist Tradition’ took place between July 29–31, 2022. The conference was hosted by the From the Ground Up: Buddhism and East Asian Religions (FROGBEAR) Project at the University of British Columbia (UBC), with the assistance of the Glorisun Global Network of Buddhist Studies at Yale University. The conference was made possible with generous support from the Glorisun Charitable Foundation in Hong Kong. It brought together scholars from many countries around the world specializing in Chan, Zen, Sŏn, and Thiền studies, who presented their research in three different languages. It was an enriching opportunity to subtly shift the center of gravity of East Asian Buddhist studies and extend it to a more intercultural and interregional perspective. The conference lasted three days and was divided into ten thematic blocks, each of which focused on a specific issue ranging from methodological, political, and literary issues, among others. This event was also the intersegmental conference for the 2022 Glorisun International and Intensive Program on Buddhist Studies—a program that trains emerging Buddhist studies students from around the world with lectures given by prominent Buddhologists.

Day 1 (July 29/30)
The opening session began with welcoming remarks from the co-hosts: Jinhua Chen (UBC) and Eric Greene (Yale University). The first panel was titled ‘Revision and Reevaluation: Big Picture and Smaller Cases’, chaired by Sujung Kim (DePauw University), with John Jorgenson (independent scholar) who discussed papers by T. Griffith Foulk (Sarah Lawrence College) and Alan Cole (independent scholar); and Kirill Solonin (Renmin University of China) who discussed papers by Ibuki Atsushi 伊吹敦 (Toyo University), Allan Yi Ding 丁一 (DePaul University), and Yan Shiwei 嚴世偉 (Peking University).

 

About the Author: Marcel Werbik is a last-year M.A. student in both Sinology and Cultural Anthropology at the Jagiellonian University. He received B.A. in Indology and Sinology at the University of Warsaw and studied Chinese language at the National University of Sun Yat-sen within the Huayu Enrichment Scholarship. His main research interests include heterogeneousness of the discourse in/about Chan poetry, Chinese Esoteric Buddhism, Azhaliism (阿吒力教),and Vietnamese Buddhism. He is writing an M.A. thesis about the reception of Hanshan shi (寒山詩) (in Sinology) and the contemporarily-emerged tradition of Chinese Esoteric Buddhism (in Cultural Anthropology).

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.