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Title

Michael Radich co-editor of encyclopedia on Buddhism

Date:

Date: 

29 November 2019

The Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism aims to be a comprehensive work offering readers a balanced and detailed treatment of the plurality of Buddhist traditions across Asia in six thematically arranged volumes. It does so by presenting the latest research on the main aspects of the Buddhist traditions in original essays written by the world's foremost scholars in the field. The print version of the thematic encyclopedia is followed by an ever-expanding online resource database with multiple references intended to provide easy access to the encyclopedic ever-growing corpus of information.

The second volume of the series, "Lives," focuses on the biographies of important figures who created, sustained, and divulgated the doctrine of Buddhism in the pre-modern period, both historical and fictional. It presents almost 200 individual entries subdivided per geographical area, spanning almost all of Asia. The corpus emphasizes how Buddhism is simultaneously constituted by a plurality of regional traditions, and how a far-reaching its cultural impact was, and still is, on a wider, trans-local scale.

Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism is under the general editorial control of
Jonathan Silk (Leiden University, editor-in-chief),
Richard Bowring (University of Cambridge) and
Vincent Eltschinger (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris). In addition, each volume has a dedicated board of specialist editors. Michael Radich is China editor for the second thematic volume, “Lives.” The encyclopedia is part of Brill´s series “
Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 2 South Asia.”

Prof.
Michael Radich took up the
Professorship of Buddhist Studies at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies in January 2018. Before that, he held visiting positions at
Kyoto University, the
University of Hamburg, and at
Victoria University of Wellington. His research interests include the history of Mahāyāna Buddhist texts and ideas; the transcultural processes by which Buddhism developed in China; and the application of computational humanities methods to philological questions in large digitized classical corpora.