Daniel Boucher is Associate Professor of East Asian Religions and Buddhism at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

. He earned his Ph.D. in 1996 from University of Pennsylvania

University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...

, focusing on the transmission of Buddhism from India to China under the guidance of Victor H. Mair

Victor H. Mair

Victor Henry Mair is a Philologist specializing in Sinitic and Indo-European languages, and holds the position of Professor of Chinese Language and Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States...

. His scholarly focus is Buddhist studies

Buddhist Studies

Buddhist studies, also known as Buddhology , is the academic study of Buddhism. The term applies especially to the modern academic field, which is a subset of Religious Studies, and is distinct from Buddhist philosophy or Buddhist theology...

, particularly the early development of the cluster of Indian Buddhist movements called the Mahayana

Mahayana

Mahāyāna is one of the two main existing branches of Buddhism and a term for classification of Buddhist philosophies and practice...

 and their transmission to China in the first few centuries of the Common Era. Professor Boucher's interests also include translation as a religious genre, with special focus on the earliest translations of Buddhist texts into Chinese; Buddhist Middle Indo-Aryan, particularly the role of Gandhari Prakrit in the earliest transmission of Buddhism to Central Asia and China; art historical, epigraphical, and archeological materials as sources for the study of religion; and history, theory, and methods in the academic study of religion.

Selected Publications

• Bodhisattvas of the Forest and the Formation of the Mahayana: A Study and Translation of the Rastrapalapariprccha-sutra (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008).
• China at the Crossroads: A Festschrift in Honor of Victor H. Mair. Special Issue of Asia Major 3rd. ser., 19, pts. 1-2. Co-edited with Neil Schmid and Tansen Sen.
• "The Pratityasamutpadagatha and Its Role in the Medieval Cult of the Relics," The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 14.1 (1991) : 1-27.
• "Sutra on the Merit of Bathing the Buddha," in Donald S. Lopez, Jr., ed., Buddhism in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 59-68; reprinted in Donald S. Lopez, Jr., ed., An Anthology of Asian Religions in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 206-215.
• "The Nagaropamasutra: An Apotropaic Text from the Samyuktagama. A Transliteration, Reconstruction, and Translation of the Central Asian Sanskrit Manuscripts," In collaboration with Gregory Bongard-Levin, Takamichi Fukita, and Klaus Wille in Sanskrit-Texte aus dem buddhistischen Kanon: Neuentdeckungen und Neueditionen III. Sanskrit-Worterbuch der buddhistischen Texte aus den Turfan-Funden, Beiheft 6 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 7-131.
• "Gandhari and the Early Chinese Buddhist Translations Reconsidered: The Case of the Saddharmapundarikasutra," Journal of the American Oriental Society 118.4 (1998) : 471-506.
• "On Hu and Fan Again: the Transmission of 'Barbarian' Manuscripts to China," The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 23.1 (2000): 7-28.

External links

• Homepage at Cornell