Shen, Shoucheng

Shoucheng Shen’s Ph.D. research examines education in Dunhuang district in Sui and Tang dynasties Chinese society, with particular attention to Buddhist monastic education. Most of his research data comes from Dunhuang manuscripts, a cache of important religious and secular documents discovered in the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China, in the early 20th century.

The FROGBEAR project houses a digital repository of Buddhist and East Asian religious material culture and texts, and I hope to find some specific materials in this database. By identifying and analyzing relevant new textual sources, I will examine how local political families impacted the Buddhist community. Based on these findings, I want to conduct further research on kinship ties in relation to religious life in Dunhuang district. From the kinship ties perspective, I will study the internal causes that forced and shaped the religious orientation and transformation of the whole family.