ERC Grant Buddhism along the Silk Roads
The European Research Council finances the research project of religious studies scholar Carmen Meinert with two million euros. Her team is looking forward to exciting travels – to China and back in time.
Prof Dr Carmen Meinert from Ruhr-Universität Bochum has been awarded a two-million euros Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). The researcher at the Center for Religious Studies will spend the next five years investigating how Buddhist localisations were shaped in premodern Central Asian cultures on a regional level.
In the process, Meinert will study questions such as: How did Buddhism spread in multi-cultural, multi-linguistic and multi-religious Central Asia? Which local cultures were influenced by Buddhist ideas? And how did Buddhist beliefs change following the foray into those vast regions of deserts and steppes? The project bears the title “Dynamics in Buddhist Networks in Eastern Central Asia, 6th–14th Centuries”, or “Buddhist Road” for short. It is one of eight German projects in the field of social studies and humanities that were selected by the ERC.
Between archives and field work
In the course of the project, the researchers will for the first time investigate the transregional historical links between the Buddhist traditions in modern China, India and Tibet and the regional Buddhist cultures in Central Asia. Projected activities include source analyses of manuscripts in various European archives, as well as several field research trips in the regions of the medieval Buddhist Kingdom of Khotan, the Uyghur Khaganate and the Tangut Empire – regions that today are part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China.
The international team from Bochum is mainly interested in the way traders and monks distributed Buddhist ideas along the Silk Roads and to what extent those ideas were adopted by native peoples.
New approaches in religious studies
So far, Buddhism in Eastern Central Asia has not yet been thoroughly studied from the point of view of interregional contacts. Carmen Meinert’s team investigates it from the perspective of comparative religious studies. The academics intend to establish a new research approach that incorporates philology, art history, archaeology and religious studies. Thus, they wish to analyse the exchange of religious beliefs in Eastern Central Asia as a dynamic network.