BERKELEY— The Numata Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is pleased to announcethat the winner of the 2023 Toshihide Numata Book Award in Buddhism is Professor John Kieschnick (Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Professor of Buddhist Studies, Stanford University), for his book Buddhist Historiography in China (Columbia University Press, 2022).
The Toshihide Numata Book Award in Buddhism is presented on an annual basis to an outstanding book in the area of Buddhist studies. The selection is made by an external committee that is appointed annually. Members of this year’s committee had high praise for the volume, with one calling it, “a masterful study of Chinese Buddhist historiography from the fifth to the twentieth century. It is focused on a corpus of over thirty works, belonging to three distinct phases, all written by erudite authors conversant in the classics and influenced by secular modes of writing history.” Reviewers laud the author’s “clear, jargon-free prose that is accessible even to the nonspecialist,” and commend it as a “thought-provoking read and a relevant source for anyone in Buddhist studies interested in history and historiography, and will have a profound impact on the field at large.”
Professor Kieschnick will be presented with the Toshihide Numata Book Award on Friday, December 1, 2023. The award presentation will begin at 2 p.m. Pacific time. Following the presentation, Professor Kieschnick will deliver a keynote lecture, followed by a panel with presentations by Professors Eric Greene (Yale University), Marta Sernesi (École Pratique des Hautes Études), and Stephen Teiser (Princeton University).
More information about the Toshihide Numata Book Award in Buddhism, including names of past recipients of the Award, can be found here:
https://buddhiststudies.berkeley.edu/buddhist-studies/toshihide-numata-b....
