Religions - Encounters - Traditions

Whether the "Far East", the "Orient" or the "Christian Occident" – geographical territories are often identified as cultural and even religious homogenous blocks and/or traditions. Not has not started in today's age of globalisation, but even in the millenials before frequent and fruitful encounters and contacts between culturally different remote regions and thereby religions were already in existence.

CERES' focus area on Religions - Encounters - Traditions deals with these encounters and contacts that time and again provoked mutual effects on both religions as well as remote territories as for example to the development of religious traditions. The research within this focus area is based on the assumption that all so-called world religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hindu religions, Taoism and Confucianism) are no monolithic entities at all but were constituted in a long process of mutual exchange - and are still developing further today.

The main target of this focus area is the development of a common typology for religious encounters combined with a comprehensive theory of religious transfer, which takes the wide sprectrum of adoption, identification, and demarcation into account. Special emphasis is laid on the topic of tradition, which is for example employed by religious actors to legitimate processes of re-identifcation and demarcation. Further appropriate topics identified and used for comparisons between religions are "purity", "secret", "religion and the senses", or "stability and dynamics". In order to achieve the research results, a new online companion to Entangled Religions (ER) will be established.

Current Projects

Tradition Building Processes among the Kagyüpas

Based on a Mid to Late-Thirteenth Century Manuscript of Jigten Sumgön’s dGongs gcig

With the purpose of providing philologically well-grounded research concerning tradition building processes among the Tibetan Buddhist Kagyüpa traditions in the ...

Completed Projects