On Tuesday (06.12.2022) the BuddhistRoad Team welcomed the project cooperation partner Zhouyang Ma, PhD candidate at Harvard University, at CERES, Ruhr University Bochum, to discuss aspects of his collaboration with the project in person. He is one of the few specialists worldwide on Tibetan Buddhist epistemology as it was transmitted in Tangut translations from the 12th century in Eastern Central Asia – a much welcomed additional expertise for the BuddhistRoad research agenda.
After Zhouyang Ma gave a BuddistRoad Guest Lecture on June 12th, 2020 on the authorship, content, and significance of a Tibetan Buddhist text translated into Tangut, which is entitled sew2 ˑjij1 ˑo2 śjij1 dźju1 sji2 lju̱2 tshjịj2 [The Ornament which Clarifies the Introduction to Speculative Thinking] and recorded as Tang. 314 in catalogues of Tangut Buddhist texts, his research results were published as BuddhistRoad Paper 1.5, entitled “Introduction to Speculative Thinking: A Hitherto Unknown Work of Maja Jangchup Tsöndrü (d. 1185, rMa bya Byang chub brtson ’grus) in Tangut Translation”.
Zhouyang Ma will further contribute to volume two of the book The Buddhist Road: Major Themes in Central Asian Buddhism, which will be co-authored by the BuddhistRoad Team and published with Brill.