About

Kevin Buckelew is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University, specializing in the study of Chinese Buddhism. He holds a B.A. in liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College and a Ph.D. from Columbia University's Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. His research focuses on Buddhism in premodern China, with particular attention to Chan (Zen) Buddhism and the interactions between Chinese Buddhists and Daoists. His thematic interests include embodiment, authority, gender and masculinity, agency and responsibility, work and labor, and the use of metaphor and figurative language in religious contexts. Buckelew has conducted research in China, Taiwan, and Japan supported by grants from the Fulbright program and the Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai. His scholarly contributions include a book titled 'Discerning Buddhas: Authority, Agency, and Masculinity in Chan Buddhism,' which explores how Chan Buddhists claimed religious authority comparable to the historical Buddha and how this influenced Chinese Buddhist identity and practices. His work examines themes of gender and masculinity in constructing the ideal Chan master and the role of sovereignty tropes in discussions of authority. He has also co-edited 'Buddhist Masculinities,' a comprehensive treatment of masculinity across Buddhist traditions. His ongoing research includes a project tentatively titled 'Karma, Commerce, and Conscience,' which analyzes texts about the Tang-period layman Pang Yun to explore moral responsibility in Chinese Buddhism. Buckelew's broader interest lies in the relationship between Buddhism and Daoism, especially how these traditions conceive of liberation and bodily practices in dialogue with each other.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• Theology
• Philosophy
• Political Science
• Religious studies
• History
• Law
• Art history
• Epistemology
• Gender studies
• Literature
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• Review of The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century

  Journal of the American Oriental Society · 2025-02-27

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century. By Stephanie Balkwill. University of California Press. Pp. xx + 262. $34.95 (paper); open access.

  PublisherDOI

• Embodying Xuanzang: The Postmortem Travels of a Buddhist Pilgrim by Benjamin Brose (review)

  Journal of Chinese Religions · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Art
  • Art history
  PublisherDOI

• Discerning Buddhas

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2024-12-31 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Discerning Buddhas argues that Chan Buddhists wove together tropes of sovereignty, hospitality, and martial heroism drawn from both Buddhist tradition and China’s cultural heritage to develop a distinctive vision of what it meant for a Chan master to be a buddha in Song-period China.

  PublisherDOI

• Transcendents in Translation: Buddhist Affordances for Imagining xian 仙 in China

  Journal of Chinese Religions · 2023-12-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: Many Buddhist scriptures in Chinese translation render the Indic ṛṣi (non-Buddhist sage or ascetic) as the Chinese xian 仙 (transcendent). This article explores how such a nativizing act of translation afforded Chinese users of Buddhist scriptures, from the medieval to the late imperial periods, various interpretive and polemical opportunities. Sometimes the appearance of xian in Buddhist scriptures facilitated Chinese Buddhist polemics against Daoism, but in other cases the same Buddhist xian provided Daoists the chance to appropriate Buddhist ideas into a Daoist soteriological framework. Still other cases involved complex negotiations over the precise meaning of xian , the nuances of which we must carefully tease out. Besides exploring many cases that illuminate the Chinese reception of Buddhist references to xian , I suggest that the concept of "affordance" is useful for analyzing the ramifications carried by particular translation choices made during the rendering of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese.

  PublisherDOI

• Two How Chan Masters Became “Great Men”: Masculinity in Chinese Chan Buddhism

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • Art
  PublisherDOI

• Possessing Enlightenment: Sorcery, Selfhood, and Tragic Responsibility in a Chinese Buddhist Apocryphon

  Numen · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Philosophy

  Abstract This article explores how the Lengyan jing , or Śūrangama Sūtra – an apocryphal Buddhist scripture written in China around 705 CE – remapped Chinese Buddhist understandings of moral responsibility in consequential ways. Although grounded in the orthodox doctrinal premise that all sentient beings innately possess buddha-nature, the Lengyan jing is punctuated by warnings about the danger that even the most earnest seekers of enlightenment might be possessed by demons, embark on evil behavior, and end up fully demonic. Such warnings depart from longstanding norms in Buddhist ethics, according to which responsibility for fault is measured in terms of a person’s intentions. Instead, I argue that the Lengyan jing articulates a moral logic of what Sandra Macpherson calls “tragic responsibility.” This logic informed important but overlooked aspects of the soteriological vision found in key texts from the Chan (Japanese Zen) tradition, which rose to prominence in the centuries following the Lengyan jing ’s composition.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• <i>Chan before Chan: Meditation, Repentance, and Visionary Experience in Chinese Buddhism</i>. By Eric M. Greene. Kuroda Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism 28. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021. Pp. 336. $68.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper).

  History of Religions · 2022-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Ritual Authority and the Problem of Likeness in Chan Buddhism

  History of Religions · 2022-08-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  For decades, scholars have suggested that the rise of the Chan (J. Zen) Buddhist tradition between China’s Tang (618–907) and Song (960–1279) dynasties involved an unprecedentedly bold claim to religious authority. Chan masters were understood to be not just eminent Buddhist monastics but actual living buddhas, whose recorded words were considered equally authoritative to Buddhist scriptures. Central to the formation of Chan identity as a school of buddhas was the ceremony of “ascending the hall,” during which Chan masters serving as abbots of public monasteries preached to and answered questions from members of the monastic assembly and the lay public. This article presents a new interpretation of the ascending the hall ceremony’s role in constituting Chan masters as figures of buddha-like authority, paying particular attention to the problem of likeness itself. According to prevailing scriptural and visual-cultural conventions, buddhas were larger-than-life figures with marvelous bodies and miraculous powers. Chan masters in the Song, by contrast, were typically presented as conspicuously lacking these spectacular features. Drawing on overlooked passages from Song period Chan literature, I analyze how Chan Buddhists managed the question of their likeness to the Buddha—but never categorically resolved it—through an intertwined process of routinely ascending the hall and composing literary representations of ascending the hall. Ultimately, I suggest, they succeeded in translating the concept of buddhahood into a distinctively Chinese cultural idiom. By analyzing accounts of Chan ritual failure in the writings of Song period Chinese literati, however, I also argue that there were limits to Chan masters’ capacities to incorporate their own unlikeness to the Buddha into a new, specifically Chinese, vision of buddhahood.

  PublisherDOI

• Becoming Chinese Buddhas: Claims to Authority and the Making of Chan Buddhist Identity

  T oung Pao · 2019-11-11 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract According to many recent scholars, by the Song dynasty Chan Buddhists had come to identify not primarily as meditation experts—following the literal meaning of chan —but rather as full-fledged buddhas. This article pursues a deeper understanding of how, exactly, Chan Buddhists claimed to be buddhas during the eighth through eleventh centuries, a critical period in the formation of Chan identity. It also addresses the relationship between Chan Buddhists’ claims to the personal status of buddhahood, their claims to membership in lineages extending back to the Buddha, and their appeals to doctrines of universal buddhahood. Closely examining Chan Buddhists’ claims to be buddhas helps explain the tradition’s rise to virtually unrivaled elite status in Song-era Buddhist monasticism, and illuminates the emergence of new genres of Chan Buddhist literature—such as “discourse records” ( yulu )—that came to be treated with the respect previously reserved for canonical Buddhist scriptures.

  PublisherDOI

• Inventing Chinese Buddhas: Identity, Authority, and Liberation in Song-Dynasty Chan Buddhism

  Columbia Academic Commons (Columbia University) · 2018-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This dissertation explores how Chan Buddhists made the unprecedented claim to a level of religious authority on par with the historical Buddha Śākyamuni and, in the process, invented what it means to be a buddha in China. This claim helped propel the Chan tradition to dominance of elite monastic Buddhism during the Song dynasty (960-1279), licensed an outpouring of Chan literature treated as equivalent to scripture, and changed the way Chinese Buddhists understood their own capacity for religious authority in relation to the historical Buddha and the Indian homeland of Buddhism. But the claim itself was fraught with complication. After all, according to canonical Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha was easily recognizable by the “marks of the great man” that adorned his body, while the same could not be said for Chan masters in the Song. What, then, distinguished Chan masters from everyone else? What authorized their elite status and granted them the authority of buddhas? According to what normative ideals did Chan aspirants pursue liberation, and by what standards did Chan masters evaluate their students to determine who was worthy of admission into an elite Chan lineage? How, in short, could one recognize a buddha in Song-dynasty China? The Chan tradition never answered this question once and for all; instead, the question broadly animated Chan rituals, institutional norms, literary practices, and visual cultures. My dissertation takes a performative approach to the analysis of Chan hagiographies, discourse records, commentarial collections, and visual materials, mobilizing the tradition’s rich archive to measure how Chan interventions in Buddhist tradition changed the landscape of elite Chinese Buddhism and participated in the epochal changes attending China’s Tang-to-Song transition.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kelsey Seymour

  34 shared

• Jinhui Wu

  21 shared

• Peiying Lin

  Northeast Agricultural University

  21 shared

• Peiying Lin

  13 shared

• Jinhui Wu

  13 shared

• Jinhui Wu

  5 shared

• Kelsey Seymour

  5 shared

• Pei-Ying Lin

  National Chengchi University

  5 shared

Education

• Ph.D., East Asian Languages and Cultures

  Columbia University

  2018

Awards & honors

• Discerning Buddhas: Authority, Agency, and Masculinity in Ch…
• Buddhist Masculinities (Columbia University Press, 2023)