Jason Protass

My dissertation focuses on eighty-six matched rhyme and other poems set against the life of their author, Buddhist poet-monk Daoqian (1043-1112). I examine tensions and synergies between Buddhism and poetry in five stages of Daoqian's monastic career. Daoqian’s well-preserved body of work offers rich examples of how poetry functioned in the life of a Chinese monk. My analysis of social poetry, especially matched rhyme poetry, recontextualizes Buddhism in intellectual and social history of the Song Dynasty. My previous research searched digital resources to reunite long-separated matched rhyme poems and restore Daoqian’s actual dialogues with other poets. These dialogues reveal the religious concerns and daily lives of monks and laymen in China’s Middle Period.

“Heart of the River” is a riverine history of Buddhism in China, and a Buddhist history of the lower Yangtze River and the coastal estuaries of Fujian. It tells the stories of four religious sites, each a riparian construction that first flourished in China’s Song dynasty, from 960 to 1279, and narrates their histories of maintenance, ruination, and reconstruction up to the present time. Each chapter triangulates local poetry and literature, geographic and environmental historical information, Chinese Buddhist liturgy, stelae inscriptions, and hagiography. Drawing together these various historical sources, “Heart of the River” foregrounds questions about the interlocking of human and nonhuman scales of time in Buddhist engineering; rivers, estuaries, and animals as agents in Buddhist history; how Buddhists understood “natural” disasters and cycles of reconstruction; and the aesthetic charisma and geospiritual affordances of islets. This will result in a history of Chinese Buddhism that accounts for the ways that Buddhists transformed the environments in which they lived. At the same time, careful historical work can reveal environmental subjectivities previously unknown.