WU Wei

My research interests include Chinese Buddhism, cross-cultural religious exchange, Buddhist modernity, religion and state, religion and ecology. My monography in preparation, Esoteric Buddhism in China, 1912-1949 intervenes in the fields of Religious Studies and History. It locates the cross-cultural religious transmission in China when Buddhists were challenged by discourses of nation-building and religious reform after 1912. It documents the transmission of certain lineages of Japanese and Tibetan esoteric Buddhism and their impact on local forms of Chinese Buddhism from the 1910s to the 1940s. I also examine how esoteric Buddhism underwent transmutations in doctrines, praxis, and institutional formations to adapt to the Chinese Buddhist world. I have written on Buddhism and superstition, the formation of a Tibetan Gelug lineage founded by the Chinese monk Nenghai in Chengdu, and the Chinese Buddhists’ learning of Tibetan commentaries. I also collaborated with scholars of various disciplines to investigate the religious history of Sichuan (https://sichuanreligions.com/). I teach courses on Asian religions, Religion and Modernity, and Religion and Ecology.