Yuyao Cheng

I work on the history of repentance in East Asia, with a special focus on the Korean peninsula. My research follows Buddhist ideas and practices of repentance, confession, remorse, karmic repair, forgiveness, and absolution across texts, images, spaces, and materials. Taking the Korean peninsula as a critical site from which to reimagine both East Asia and middle ages, I ask how repentance became a social technology for naming wrongdoing, redistributing responsibility, repairing relations among the living and the dead, and holding damaged worlds open to transformation. Rather than treating East Asia as a fixed cultural map, or middle ages as a self-contained period, I approach them as shifting networks made through ritual practice, textual circulation, bodily discipline, material exchange, and social memory. I am especially interested in the social and ritual encounters that brought Buddhist forms of repair into relation with other ways of understanding mistake, harm, responsibility, punishment, and pardon.

My broader project seeks to recover neglected voices and social locations often obscured by elite histories: grassroots practitioners, lay communities, women, children, the sick, the dead, and those whose lives appear only briefly in traces and fragments. Methodologically, my research is interdisciplinary, combining textual analysis with ritual studies, material culture, religious anthropology, and intellectual history. I am drawn to moments when religious categories that seem stable become unstable, and when that instability reveals how people envisioned and pursued the repair of damaged selves, communities, and worlds.