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| Student Biography |
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Susan Andrews |
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Biography
Susan (Susie) Andrews is a Ph.D. candidate in the East Asian Religions subfield in Columbia University’s Department of Religion. Her research focuses on Chinese and Japanese sacred place and pilgrimage traditions, the cults of the bodhisattvas, and the relationship between hagiography and landscape. These subjects converge in the question: How do stories of a religious achiever’s life and relationship to a place contribute to the sense that a site is sacred and merits devotional attention in the form of patronage and pilgrimage?
Drawing on a range of visual, textual, oral, and ritual tradition, Susie’s dissertation research pursues one answer to this question in the context of the pan-Asian Mount Wutai cult of the bodhisattva Wenshu (Manjusri). Focusing on a particular group of temples, huasi (transformation temples), erected first at Mount Wutai in Shanxi, China and soon thereafter in Kansai, Japan, her research aims to elucidate some of the complex ways Nara, Heian, and Kamakura Buddhism interacted with a particular Chinese locale. The project seeks to better understand the ways in which the East Asian Wenshu tradition made use of a variety of texts and art. It should help us to appreciate the importance of studying local traditions in their broader East Asian context.
In 2005-2006 Susie was a research fellow at the Institute for Comprehensive Buddhist Studies, Taisho University. The year of study was funded by a Buddha Dharma Kyokai Canada Graduate Scholarship and a four year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship. Susie will return to Kansai, Japan and Shanxi, China in summer 2009 to continue her research on the pan-Asian cult of Wenshu. An Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life award will fund this research trip. The provisional title of the research project is: “Replicating Replicas: The Conjured Temple traditions of Mount Wutai .”
This spring Susie’s article “Tales of Conjured Temples in Qing period Mountain Gazetteers” will appear in the Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Buddhist Studies which is a revised paper that she first presented at the “Wutai shan and Qing culture” conference (May 12-13, 2007).
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