Over three days in late August 2013, the Australian Centre on China in the World hosted the workshop ‘Religion and Locality in the Chinese World‘. Two keynote addresses drew the attention of scholars attending the workshop and the broader community. They were both introduced by Dr Benjamin Penny, one of the organisers of the workshop.
Professor Chen Jidong 陳継東 of Aoyama Gakuin University gave a talk titled ‘In Search of Shakyamuni’s Scriptures – The Formation of Modern Buddhist Studies and Sino-Japanese Exchange’. Professor Chen shared his research on how nineteenth-century European scholars of Buddhism, such as Max Müller, influenced Chinese and Japanese Buddhist scholars.
Dr David A. Palmer of The University of Hong Kong spoke about ‘Locality, globalisation and the construction of sacrality: Transnational encounters at Huashan’. Drawing on his fieldwork at Huashan 華山, a renowned holy mountain in Shaanxi province, Dr Palmer wove together a collection of video material, interviews and observations to depict what is a dynamic and commercial centre of global Daoism.
