This comprises a report on a project conducted at the Ruhr University, Bochum, on the interrelationship and exchanges between China
Scholars working on different Christian cults in medieval Europe are wont to deal with the rather commonplace, although highly interesting, cases of relic thefts and the associated co-option of particular saints and their cults. Such cases reinforce our perception of the period as a dynamic and creative one in regard to the transfer and proliferation of Christian cultic practices...
After the turn of the first millennium the Chinese religious landscape had developed to a degree that the production of hybrid Buddho-Daoist ritual texts was a widespread phenomenon. With the rise of a Daoist trend referred to as Thunder Rites (leifa 雷法), which matured during the mid- to late-Song 宋 Dynasty (960–1279) and did not solely pertain to any particular branch of Daoism...
This paper is based on a larger study of conceptions of the afterlife in the engraved texts of 496 entombed epigraphs (muzhi 墓誌) and 494 votive stele inscriptions (zaoxiangji 造像記) from northern China from the fifth and sixth century CE, using the database of Wei Jin Nanbeichao Stone inscriptions 魏晉南北朝石刻語料庫, part of the larger database of excavated documents from the Wei Jin...