Postdoctoral Fellow, the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies Dr. Sangyop Lee

Karl Jaspers Centre
Voßstraße 2, Building 4400
Room 400.01.24
69115 Heidelberg
Germany

Email: sangyop.lee@hcts.uni-heidelberg.de

Sangyop Lee studies the social, cultural, and intellectual history of early Chinese Buddhism. He received his PhD (2021) from the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, with a dissertation on the scholastic discourse about the imperishable soul in early medieval Chinese Buddhism and the discourse’s influence on Chinese Mahāyāna thought, and received his BA (2010) and MA (2013) from the Department of Philosophy at Seoul National University, with a focus on the intellectual history of East Asian Buddhism. His current project is about the corpus of translations produced in late-fourth century Chang’an under the leadership of the Chinese scholar-monk Dao’an (314–385). Project: “Dao’an’s Translation Projects in 380s Chang’an” This project aims to uncover lost details about the developing translation practices and theories in late-fourth century China with the combined application of traditional philological and historical analysis and digital humanities approach on the bibliographical, biographical, and textual sources related to Dao’an’s translation team. While the so-called “archaic” translations (produced from the second to the early fourth century by figures like Lokakṣema and Dharmarakṣa) and the “classical” and “new” translations (produced from the fifth to the seventh century by figures like Kumārajīva and Xuanzang) have been studied in detail by scholars, the corpus of translations produced by the team Dao'an assembled in the late 370s and lasted until his death in 385 has not received equivalent academic attention. However, a proper understanding of this translation corpus is crucial, as it will help us contextualize the archaic and classical translations in unprecedented detail and will also allow us to better understand the decisions the translators of the early fifth century had to make when they embarked on the production of the classical translations that numerous Buddhists throughout East Asia rely on to this very day. Teaching: “Buddhist Philosophy,” offered at the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University in 2020 Spring.