Christoph Emmrich, Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies, engages with fields as diverse as Newar Buddhism, Pali and Burmese literature and Tamil Jainism. He has recently been working on and with Newar girls and young women in the Kathmandu Valley (Nepal) studying their involvement in Buddhist practices related to marriage, image consecration, temporary ordination and female education. In this particular project he confronts the personal and ethnographic remembrance of singular religious events with the history of their local and academic exegesis and contrasts both with the prescriptive/descriptive literary history of ritual manuals in Newar and Sanskrit reaching back to the early 17th century. Christoph Emmrich further works on the literary representation of Buddhist monastic networks, lineage and travel between Nepal, Yangon and Mawlamyine (Burma) as well as on the historiography of Tamil Digambara Jain temple ritual in North and South Arcot (Tamil Nadu, India) addressing questions of assimilation and resistance.
Areas of Interest
- Buddhism and Jainism in South and Southeast Asia
- Nepalese (particularly Newar), Burmese (particularly Mon) and Tamil (particularly Jain) religion
- Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, Newar, Burmese and Tamil literatures
- time and religion, children and religion, travel and religion
- the historiography and poetics of ritual
Primary Teaching
RLG377 Theravāda Literature
RLG462/RLG3710 Newar Religion
RLG463 Causation and Time in Buddhist Scholastic Debate
RLG467/RLG3415 Theravāda Practice
RLG3448 Sanskrit Buddhist Tantric Literature
Current Publications
“The Ins and Outs of the Jains in Tamil Literary Histories.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 39, no. 6 (2011), 599-646.
„Śvetāmbaras, Digambaras und die Geschichte ihres Kanons als Besitz, Verlust und Erfindung“ (Śvetāmbaras, Digambaras and the History of their Canon as Property, Loss and Invention). Kanonisierung und Kanonbildung in der Asiatischen Religionsgeschichte. M. Deeg, O. Freiberger and C. Kleine (eds.). Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, vol. 820. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2011, 105-129.
“Emending Perfection. Prescript, Postscript and Practice in Newar Buddhist Manuscript Culture”. In Buddhist Manuscript Cultures: Knowledge, Ritual and Art. Stephen Berkwitz, Juliane Schober and Claudia Brown (eds.). Routledge: London 2008, 140-155.
‘Aśoka’, ‘Ātmanastusti’, ‘Bhutanese Law’, ‘Sadācāra’, ‘Vyavahāra’. Entries in Encyclopedia of the History of Law. Werner Menski (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
“All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men. The 2004 Red Matsyendranātha Incident in Lalitpur”. Indologica Taurinensia 32 (2006), 31-65.
Contact Information
Position: Assistant Professor in Buddhist Studies
Department for the Study of Religion
Address: JHB, R. 303, 170 St. George Street
Tel: 416.978.6463
E-mail: christoph.emmrich@utoronto.ca