Date: Friday, December 1, 2-3.30pm BJT

Venue: CCT E1011

Speaker: Daniel Burton-Rose, Assistant Professor of History, Wenzhou-Kean University

Abstract:

Peng Shaosheng 彭紹升 (1740–96) was one of the most prolific authors on Buddhist subjects of the late Qianlong period (1736–95). Best-known for his hagiographical collections of male and female Buddhist lay devotees Biographies of Buddhist Laymen and Biographies of Buddhist Laywomen, he also wrote extensively on reconciling Confucianism and Buddhism and the Chan and Pure Land schools. This lecture focuses on a lesser-known aspect of Shaosheng’s oeuvre: his compilation of transcripts of communications between mortals and spirits dating back to the last decades of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).

Spirit-writing opens a window into how Shaosheng perpetuated inherited elements of Peng patriline family learning while pursuing his own devotional interests. In the early 1770s, in coordination with his father, Shaosheng edited two collections of early Qing Suzhou spirit-altar transcripts, including one that recorded the spirit-altar communications of the prior four generations of his male relatives. Shaosheng’s own spirit-writing activity preceded his initial upāsaka vow, but his practice quickly shifted to Buddhist-themed transmissions with the intensification of his own Buddhist commitments. Shaosheng’s Buddhism-centered spirit-altar production in turn influenced the next generation of Pengs, thereby adding Pure Land devotion to Confucianism and spirit-writing to the complex of commitments that characterized this family within the dense ecology of patrilines in the Yangzi Delta in late imperial China.

Speaker’s Bio:

Dr. Daniel Burton-Rose is an Assistant Professor of History at Wenzhou-Kean University. He obtained his doctorate from the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University in 2016. He is the co-editor, with David A. Bello, of the anthology Insect Histories of East Asia (University of Washington Press 2023) and the author of Conversing with Spirits: Prophecy and Spirit-Writing in Qing Conquest China, which is the first of several planned volumes exploring the role of communication between mortals and spirits in the self-representations of powerful families in the Yangzi Delta region in late imperial China. He serves as the Senior Editor of the journal Asian Medicine: Journal of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Medicine (Brill), for which he co-edited a special issue with Yi-Li Wu titled “African American Contributions to American Acupuncture,” and has contributed to a range of peer-reviewed scholarly journals, including Daoism: Religion, History and Society, Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies, Journal of the History of Biology, Journal on Religion and Violence, Korean Journal for the History of Science, and T’oung Pao.

This event is organized by CSCC Meanings, Identities and Communities Cluster and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Contemporary China.