Chengpeng Li

Current Research Interests:

As an avid reader of Buddhist texts, my research focuses on the intertextuality of these texts as they traverse linguistic and geographical boundaries, appearing in translations and recompositions, and adapting to new cultural and ritual contexts. Building on my foundation in Chinese and Indian Buddhist texts, my recent studies in Tai-Thai languages, scripts, religions, and history have deepened my enthusiasm for exploring Buddhist texts and communal rituals within Mainland Southeast Asian Theravada communities.

I received one of my MA degrees from Heidelberg University, Germany, with the distinction of Sehr gut. My thesis focused on the Uṣṇīṣavijayā-dhāraṇī-sūtra (UDS), a prominent Buddhist text within Asian communities, exploring its connection to the concept of life-prolonging. Utilizing digital humanities methodologies, I compared five Chinese versions and a single early Sanskrit version, challenging prior bibliographical categorizations and highlighting how medieval Chinese Buddhists translated, edited, and labeled texts as translations from Indic languages.

Extensive fieldwork in Northern Thailand, Laos, and Xishuang Banna in China, combined with exchange studies in Thai and Manuscript Studies at Hamburg University, Germany, have informed my current research at UMich on the Southeast Asian counterpart of the UDS and its associated life-prolonging ritual. This project, which extends my previous research, employs historical and ethnographic methods to trace the development of the ritual through a meticulous survey of recitation texts and ritual manuals in the Tai regions. I aim for this project to contribute to broader discussions on the characteristics of Theravada Buddhism, manuscript cultures, cultural and national identities, Tai intellectual history, and the interplay between religion and medicine, etc.

Languages:

Chinese (Mandarin and Classical), Thai, Northern Thai, Lao, Pali, Sanskrit, Japanese