Jason Protass
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Brown University

I study Buddhism of medieval China. My first book, The Poetry Demon: Song-dynasty Monks on Verse and the Way, is published in the series “Kuroda Studies in East Asian Buddhism” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021). This book examines Buddhist monks’ understanding of Chinese poetry and its relationships to the Buddhist path in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries CE. I continue to translate and write about Buddhist monks’ poetry. A list of my other publications is given here. Please email me (pro@brown.edu) if cannot access one of my essays and you would like a free electronic copy.

Currently, I am currently developing two book-length projects. One book project is an environmental history of Buddhism in China focused riverine Buddhism. I am interested in Buddhist engineering projects, which served dual practical and conceptual purposes. I co-edited a volume of essays entitled Countless Sands: Medieval Buddhists and Their Environments (University of Hawai’i Press, 2025). My research appears in Countless Sands and in a forthcoming sourcebook from Columbia University Press, as I continue writing environmental histories of Buddhism in medieval China.

A second book project concerns lay Buddhists in the Northern Song. This research is centered on the excavated woodblock text Quanhuawen (preface dated 1104), a set of 15 essays for lay practice composed by Chan Master Changlu Zongze (d. 1106). That project emerges from a broader interest in recovering the history of the Yunmen lineage of Chan Buddhism shortly before its sudden decline circa 1130. More research about Chan appears in two essays earlier about spatial histories of Chan (2016, 2019); as well as an initial exploration of the Quanhuawen codex (2021). Related, I was the co-editor of the special issue “Geospatial Studies of Chinese Religions” of Review of Religion and Chinese Society (2016) focused on GIS-based digital humanities.

I am especially interested in Chan Buddhism. I have an active interest in the book history of Chan, as well as in Chan-Zen interactions. I have written about manuscripts of Chinese monks in Japanese collections and rare printed books, both in The Poetry Demon and in essays (2020, 2023); and with a special focus on translingual “brush-talk” (2022).

I am the author of the Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism entry for the Song Dynasty, and co-author of “Buddhist Poetry of China” for Oxford Bibliographies Online.

I welcome potential graduate studies to email me and discuss their research interests.

email pro@brown.edu

Prof. Jason Protass
Religious Studies
59 George Street
Providence, RI 02912-1927

+1 (401) 863-3105