Benjamin Brose is a professor of Buddhist and Chinese studies. His work focuses on the history of Buddhism in China and cultural exchange in East Asia.
The fellowship was awarded in support of a new book project examining the history of modern Chinese Buddhism. Brose’s research centers on the life and writings of a Buddhist layman named Gao Henian. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Gao spent over thirty years traveling thousands of miles to visit a succession of Buddhist and Daoist mountains and meet with the eminent monks and adepts who lived there. Over the course of his long life, he visited nearly every significant Buddhist site in mainland China, bearing witness to one of the most transformative periods of modern Chinese history. He befriended many of the leading clerics of his generation, became an influential advocate for an embattled Buddhist community, and, later, worked on behalf of ordinary Chinese citizens suffering the deprivations of natural disasters, foreign occupation, and civil war. Thankfully, according to Brose, Gao had the foresight to write it all down. His detailed travelogues offer intimate, eyewitness accounts of life in China during the tumultuous century from 1860 to 1960.
