Workshop on “Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Buddhism in Contact” — Rühr University (Germany), 27-28 June 2018.

Formative Exchanges in Western and Central Asia (PDF)

Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Buddhism in Contact
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The workshop addresses cases of religious interactions between Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Buddhism in the Iranian plateau, the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, and China to the end of the first millennium AD. The participants to the workshop investigate formative dynamics of contacts, interactions, and exchanges that took place between Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Buddhism at multiple levels: knowledge, ritual, material, and experiential.

The workshop considers the literary and social negotiations Manichaeism carried with Zoroastrianism, as an imperially-mandated religion, in the Sasanian Empire, between the third and the seventh centuries. To this, it adds the perspective of religious interactions across central Asia and into China, to the end of the first millennium AD. The workshop participants will examine the various ways along which Manichaeism moved eastward, out of the Sasanian Empire, and transformed itself in contact with Buddhism. In analyzing the ways in which religions were imported, adopted and transformed in Western and Central Asia, the 2018 workshop regards transformation, hybridization, and adaptation as various outcomes of religious encounters. To discuss these formative interactions of religions on the move, the organizers invited scholars to investigate primary sources in Middle Persian, Parthian, Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Sogdian, Uyghur, and Chinese, which describe religious contacts across Western and Central Asia until the end of the first millennium AD.

CONVENERS

Eduard Iricinschi
Carmen Meinert
Kianoosh Rezania

ORGANIZATION

Coordination Office — Phone +49 234 32-23341
Käte Hamburger Kolleg Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe,
Centre for Religious Studies, Ruhr-Universität Bochum