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 you cannot access one of my essays and would like a free electronic copy.

Currently, I am developing two book-length projects. One book project is a Buddhist history of China’s rivers in coastal Zhejiang and Fujian. I am interested in Buddhist engineering, projects that served dual practical and conceptual purposes. My related research has appeared in Countless Sands: Medieval Buddhists and Their Environments (University of Hawai’i Press, 2025), which I co-edited with Jeffrey Moser; and in the forthcoming China’s Environmental History: A Reader (Columbia University Press, 2027).

A second book project concerns lay Buddhists in the Northern Song. This research is centered on the excavated woodblock text Quanhuawen 勸化文 (preface dated 1104), a set of 15 essays for lay practice composed by Chan Master Changlu Zongze 長蘆宗賾 (d. 1106). That project emerges from a broader interest in recovering the history of the Yunmen lineage of Chan Buddhism before its sudden decline in the 12th century. My related research about Chan history appears in two essays earlier about spatial histories of Chan (2016, 2019); in an initial exploration of the Quanhuawen codex (2021); and in two essays about Miaozhan Sihui 妙湛思慧 (1071–1145) (2023, 2025). Also related, I was the co-editor of the special issue “Geospatial Studies of Chinese Religions,” Review of Religion and Chinese Society (2016), that 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); with a special focus on translingual “brush-talk” (2022); in a recent essay about rediscovered calligraphy by Xutang Zhiyu 虛堂智愚 (2026); and a forthcoming essay about Song and Yuan monks calligraphy recovered from early auction catalogues.

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 students 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