Koichi Shinohara
Senior lecturer of Religious Studies
Bachelor of Letters and Master of Letters, The University
of Tokyo;
Ph.D, Columbia University;
Koichi Shinohara works primarily on Buddhism in East Asia. Before coming to Yale in 2004 he taught at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. He has written widely on Chinese monastic biographies, with a focus on the works of a famous historian and a vinaya specialist Daoxuan (596-677) and his collaborator Daoshi (dates unknown). Daoshi was the compiler of the Fayuan zhulin, an encyclopedic anthology of scriptural passages and Chinese Buddhist miracle stories, which Dr. Shinohara is in the process of translating into English. Through the study of these biographies as a distinct type of religious literature, Dr. Shinohara became interested in sacred places and the stories told about them. Daoxuan's writings on monastic practices also opened doors to unexpected readings of Chinese Buddhist miracle stories. More recently, Dr. Shinohara has been studying the evolution of early esoteric Buddhist rituals through Chinese sources. These rituals emerged in India and developed from simpler recitation of spells to elaborate rituals performed in front of images and ma??alas . Though much of the early evidence for this development no longer exists in Indic languages, it has been preserved in Chinese dhara?i collections and translations, some of which can be dated with certainty.
