The ERC-funded research project BuddhistRoad aims to create a new framework to enable understanding of the complexities in the dynamics of cultural encounter and religious transfer in pre-modern Eastern Central Asia. Buddhism was one major factor in this exchange: for the first time the multi-layered relationships between the trans-regional Buddhist traditions (Chinese, Indian, Tibetan) and those based on local Buddhist cultures (Khotanese, Uyghur, Tangut) will be explored in a systematic way. The second volume Buddhism in Central Asia II-Practice and Rituals, Visual and Materials Transfer based on the mid-project conference held on September 16th-18th, 2019, at CERES, Ruhr-Universitat Bochum (Germany) focuses on two of the six thematic topics addressed by the project, namely on "practices and rituals", exploring material culture in religious context such as mandalas and talismans, as well as "visual and material transfer", including shared iconographies and the spread of 'Khotanese' themes.

Reading Siva is an illustrated bibliography on the Hindu god Siva in the arts, crafts, coins, seals and inscriptions from South and Southeast Asia. It results from a century of ABIA bibliographic work and covers over 1500 academic publications since 1672. This scholarly and multi-disciplinary volume offers keyword-indexed annotations. The detailed indices on authors, geographic terms and subjects enable an easy search through the data. Links with the entries to resource repositories (such as JSTOR, Persee, Project MUSE, Academia.edu, ResearchGate and the Internet Archive) and links added to the sumptuous illustrations immediately take you to these resource sites.

Could Confucius hit a curveball?
Could Yoda block the plate?
Can the Dalai Lama dig one out of the dirt?

No, there is only one Zen master who could contemplate the circle of life while rounding the bases.

Who is this guru lurking in the grand old game? Well, he's the winner of ten World Series rings, a member of both the Hall of Fame and the All-Century Team, and perhaps the most popular and beloved ballplayer of all time. And without effort or artifice he's waxed poetic on the mysteries of time ("It gets late awful early out there"), the meaning of community ("It's so crowded nobody goes there anymore"), and even the omnipresence of hope in the direst circumstances ("It ain't over 'til it's over").

It's Yogi Berra, of course, and in What Time Is It? You Mean Now? Yogi expounds on the funny, warm, borderline inadvertent insights that are his trademark. Twenty-six chapters, one for each letter, examine the words, the meaning, and the uplifting example of a kid from St. Louis who grew up to become the consummate Yankee and the ultimate Yogi.

China has a long and complex history of interactions with the world around it. One of the most successful imports-arguably the most successful before modern times and the impact of the West-is Buddhism, which, since the first centuries of the Common Era, has spread into almost every aspect of Chinese life, thought and practice. Erik Zurcher was one of the most important scholars to study the history of Buddhism in China, and the ways in which Buddhism in China gradually became Chinese Buddhism. More than half a century after the publication of Zurcher's landmark The Buddhist Conquest of China, we now have a collection of essays from the top contemporary specialists exploring aspects of the legacy of Zurcher's investigations, bringing forward new evidence, new ideas and reconsiderations of old theories to present an up-to-date and exciting expansion and revision of what was arguably the single most influential contribution to date on the history of Chinese Buddhism. Contributors are Tim Barrett, Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Funayama Toru, Barend ter Haar, Liu Shufen, Minku Kim, Jan Nattier, Antonello Palumbo, and Nicolas Standaert.

In this groundbreaking book, based on in-depth ethnographic research spanning ten years, Antoinette Elizabeth DeNapoli brings to light the little known, and often marginalized, lives of female Hindu ascetics (sadhus) in the North Indian state of Rajasthan. Her book offers a new perspective on the practice of asceticism in India today, exploring a phenomenon she terms vernacular asceticism. Examining the everyday religious worlds and practices of primarily "unlettered" female sadhus who come from a variety of castes, Real Sadhus Sing to God illustrates that the female sadhus whom DeNapoli knew experience asceticism in relational and celebratory ways and construct their lives as paths of singing to God. While the sadhus have combined ritual initiation with institutionalized and orthodox orders of asceticism, they also draw on the non-orthodox traditions of the medieval devotional poet-saints of North India to create a form of asceticism that synthesizes multiple and competing world views. DeNapoli suggests that in the vernacular asceticism of the sadhus, singing to God serves as the female way of being an ascetic. As women who have escaped the dominant societal expectations of marriage and housework, female sadhus are unusual because they devote themselves to a way of life traditionally reserved for men in Indian society. Female sadhus are simultaneously respected and distrusted for transgressing normative gender roles in order to dedicate themselves to a life of singing to the divine. Real Sadhus Sing to God is the first book-length study to explore the ways in which female sadhus perform and, thus, create gendered views of asceticism through their singing, storytelling, and sacred text practices, which DeNapoli characterizes as the sadhus' "rhetoric of renunciation." The book also examines the relationship between asceticism (sannyas) and devotion (bhakti) in contemporary contexts. It brings together two disparate fields of study in religious scholarship-yoga/asceticism and bhakti-through use of the orienting metaphor of singing bhajans (devotional songs) to understand vernacular asceticism in contemporary India.

Kung joins with three esteemed colleagues to address the question: "Can we break through the barriers of noncommunication, fear, and mistrust that separate the followers of the world's great religions?" The authors analyze the main lines of approach taken by Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, and give Christian responses to the values and challenges each tradition presents.

This book introduces the reader to different cases of cultural intersections between Tibet and China in the field of Buddhism. The ten chapters provide a series of insights into Sino-Tibetan exchanges within religious practices and doctrines, material culture and iconography. Spanning from pre-modern encounters in Central Asia to contemporary forms of Sino-Tibetan hybridity in Chinese-speaking environments, Sino-Tibetan Buddhism Across the Ages produces further evidence that, beginning with the very introduction of Buddhism into Tibet, there were constant and fruitful contacts and blending between the Buddhist traditions developing in China and those of Tibet. Contributors are Urs App, Ester Bianchi, Isabelle Charleux, Martino Dibeltulo Concu, Alison Denton Jones, Weirong Shen, Penghao Sun, Wei Wu, Fan Zhang, and Linghui Zhang.