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Raoul Birnbaum
Raoul Birnbaum
Raoul Birnbaum works in the multidisciplinary field of Buddhist studies, with special interest in Chinese Buddhist materials. His early studies focused on what might be thought of as deity traditions – the worlds of the buddhas and bodhisattvas. He has gone on to consider such topics as mountain cults and the construction of Buddhist geographies in China, visionary experience, body practices in monastic settings, and issues related to Chinese Buddhist portraiture traditions. Over the past decade he has been looking at topics related to Buddhist life in modern China (late nineteenth century to the present). Birnbaum’s work is informed by extensive, long-term field study within Chinese Buddhist communities.
Raoul Birnbaum
University of California at Santa Cruz
Cowell Faculty Services
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Current research projects include: a book on the subject of Buddhist social engagement (to be published by Open Court, 2013); an edited volume on “Buddhists at the end of life,” based on a conference held at UCSC in spring, 2009; and a volume well under way on the topic of Buddhist expressive culture in late imperial and modern China (18th through 20th centuries).
BOOKS
The Healing Buddha (Boulder: Shambhala, 1979; London: Rider, 1980; Boston: Shambhala, revised edition, 1989 [additional chapter and preface]; Italian translation, Rome: Ubaldini, 1981; German translation, Bern, Munich, Vienna: Otto Wilhelm Barth, 1982).
Studies on the Mysteries of Mañjusri: A Group of East Asian Mandalas and their Traditional Symbolism (Boulder: Society for the Study of Chinese Religions, 1983).
Buddhist Practice, Inside and Outside: Chinese Buddhist Approaches to Engagement with the World (Chicago: Open Court, 2013 [in preparation]).
SELECTED RECENT ESSAYS
"Buddhist China at the Century’s Turn," The China Quarterly, no. 174 (June, 2003), pp. 428-50. Reprinted in Daniel Overmyer, ed., Religion in China Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 122-44.
"Master Hongyi Looks Back: A 'Modern Man' Becomes a Monk in Twentieth-Century China," in Buddhism in the Modern World: Adaptations of an Ancient Tradition, ed. Steven Heine and Charles S. Prebish (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 75-124.
"Light in the Wutai Mountains," in The Presence of Light: Divine Radiance and Religious Experience, ed. Matthew T. Kapstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 195-226.
"The Deathbed Image of Master Hongyi," in The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations, ed. Jacqueline Stone and Bryan Cuevas (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007), pp. 175-207.
"In Search of an Authentic Engaged Buddhism," Religion East & West 9 (2009), pp. 25-39. French translation in Voies de l'Orient 122 (Winter, 2012), pp. 20-36.
"Human Traces and the Experience of Powerful Places: A Note on Memory, History, and Practice in Buddhist China," in Images, Relics, and Legends: The Formation and Transformation of Buddhist Sacred Sites, ed. James A. Benn, Jinhua Chen, and James Robson (Toronto: Mosaic Press, 2011), pp. 113-138.
Courses Regularly Taught
HAVC 22 Religion and Visual Culture in China
HAVC 122A Sacred Geography in China
HAVC 127A Buddhist Visual Worlds
HAVC 127B Buddhist Pure Lands
HAVC 190D The World of the Lotus Sutra
HAVC 190F Chan Texts and Images
HAVC 190G Buddhist Wisdom Traditions
HAVC 203 Buddhist Views of the Human Body
