The main objective of this research are the flying apsaras in the grottoes of the Northern Wei Dynasty, focusing on the three main royal grottoes, Yungang Grottoes, Longmen Grottoes and Gongyi ...read more
Sheldon Pollock’s influential theories on the cosmopolitan and ‘secular’ nature of Sanskrit literature and the vernacularisation of regional Indian literatures as top-down processes which originate in royal courts do not ...read more
Many linguists believe that the language of our Indo-European ancestors had a considerable number of verbs which may appear both in intransitive and transitive constructions with no formal change in ...read more
The research object of the project consists of the Dunhuang documents related to the planetary deities and the belief in the planetary deities in the Dunhuang area in Medieval China. ...read more
Proceeding from the maxim that 'nothing can be understood apart from context', this research projects seeks to do that which is rarely done in the study of Buddhist literature. It ...read more
The scope of this project revolves around a close study of the Dīrghāgama manuscript (The Collection of Long Discourses), an important collection of Buddhist sūtras detailing the discourses of the ...read more
The purpose of this project is to perform a semantic and etymological study of the Greek verb ἀραρίσκω ‘to adapt’ and its cognates. The origin of the word, i.e. its ...read more
Recently, the Department of Languages and Cultures with the Centre for Buddhist Studies at Ghent University has joined a large multidisciplinary project on East Asian religions (for a short abstract, ...read more
This research project examines the textual history and literary characteristics of the Zǔtáng jí 祖堂集 (Collection of the Patriarchal Hall , K.1503), i.e., the earliest extant Chán history (chánshǐ 禪史), or "lamp ...read more
Jainism is a living Indian religious tradition, which rose around the sixth century BCE andlater developed into two branches: Digambarism and Śvetāmbarism. Central toDigambarism’s identity (dig-ambara, lit. "clothed in air") ...read more