Zen Buddhist Genealogical Diagrams in Early Modern Japan: Representations of Religious Authority, Implementations in Social Practice, and Transmissions of Knowledge

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Steffen Döll
• Subject Area: Asian Studies ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 519607422

This project (DFG first-time proposal) is part of a four-project- “World Genealogy. Presenting, documenting, and instrumentalizing lineages in early modern Asia, Europe, and the Middle East”. The four projects—submitted independently, yet simultaneously—discuss genealogical practices of * Middle Eastern politics, * Japanese Buddhism, * European aristocracies and state governments, and * China’s rural elites. The projects together 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 (year 1), routines of genealogical knowledge management (year 2), and the role of genealogical arguments in creating social, political, and cultural legitimacy (year 3). Within this larger context, the present project 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. The original perspectives this project brings to the Paketantrag’s table therefore include, but are not limited to, 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.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants