The field visits of Cluster 2.1 focuses on the historical sites of the traditional Chinese state sacrificial system dedicated to spirits of major mountains and waters, including Five Marchmounts 五嶽, Five Strongholds 五鎮, Four Seas 四海, and Four Waterways 四瀆, which formed a part of the most authoritative religious institutions in imperial China.
The field visits to these sites have provided a unique perspective to address questions such as when, where, and who has defined authoritative and authentic religion in China, and how the “authoritative” religion has interacted and integrated with “sub-authoritative” and “non-authoritative” traditions. By investigating these sites, researchers in this cluster will seek to realign the narrative of the history of Chinese religion with traditional Chinese state religion, which has been largely disregarded by contemporary traditions-based definitions of religion in China (e.g., Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism).
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The field visits of Cluster 2.2 were designed to focus on investigating the “primary” roles that “secondary” producers—Khitans, Jurchens, Koreans and Japanese—played in transmitting, editing, venerating and preserving Buddhist literature in Chinese during the medieval period in East Asia (ca. 10th – 15th centuries). Participants in each cluster workshop addressed two research questions: (1) what roles did editors, scribes, translators, and readers play in canon-making of Buddhist literature in Chinese, and (2) how did non-religious factors shape this process?
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How do we map out and interpret the enormous and ever-expanding traditions of authoritative texts produced via revelation practices (e.g. spirit-writing)? The mechanisms by which new texts are actually created and legitimated as a cultural process–rather than reinterpreting old texts through written and oral commentaries–has not yet received much academic attention. Most attention goes to the texts themselves, and although apocrypha are now recognized as valuable objects of study, the creative processes behind them are still little understood. This cluster focuses on the processes rather than the contents of such new religious texts.
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The cluster plans to investigate sites related to the topic of studying the transition from studying canonical scriptures primarily indexed and cataloged in the Taishō Era Buddhist Canon to an era of post-canonical analysis of high-definition digital editions of old Japanese manuscripts, rare printed materials—especially commentaries—in Korea, and stone-cut editions of canonical Buddhist texts preserved on the continent in Korea and China.
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