Zen Buddhist Genealogical Diagrams
Zen Buddhist Genealogical Diagrams in Early Modern Japan
Representations of Religious Authority, Implementations in Social Practice, and Transmissions of Knowledge
DFG-funded
runtime: 2023–2026
investigators: Steffen Döll, Michael Kinadeter
As part of the project package "World Genealogy. Presenting, documenting, and instrumentalizing lineages in early modern Asia, Europe, and the Middle East", this projects cooperates in the attempt to establish a conceptual roadmap towards a future cross-culturally comparative investigation of genealogical practices. All projects share a common research agenda and working schedule, focusing on genealogical media, routines of genealogical knowledge management, and the role of genealogical arguments in creating social, political, and cultural legitimacy. Within this larger context, "Zen Buddhist Genealogical Diagrams" addresses religious genealogies in the Chan/Zen tradition of East Asian Buddhism. The materials selected for study, while being diagrammatic in nature, draw on a rich and varied textual canon, play central roles in the Zen Buddhist self- imagination, and circulated far and wide beyond the walls of the monasteries in which they were first produced and transmitted in the first place. We address questions pertaining to genealogical concepts, motifs, and narratives in religious self-understanding and strongly sectarian contexts; to diagrammatic layouts in contrast to their representation in linear prose; and to the hermetic nature or ready availability of manuscript and print diagrams as well as their associated functions forto both religious agencies and secular collectors.