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 Japanese biographical literature and stories associated with esoteric deities. This material is written in Chinese for readers familiar with Chinese Buddhist sources. Although today this material is studied mostly by scholars who specialize in Japanese Buddhism, it belongs to a larger class of Buddhist writing in East Asia as a whole. The stories told in these Japanese sources need to be read with as much attention to their parallels in Chinese collections as to their immediate Japanese context.
