This talk aims to address two gaps in Sinological studies on Southeast Asia. There have been many systematic works that have described the history of connections between East Asia—China in particular—India, and Southeast Asia, but one of the areas that has slipped through the cracks in that coverage is the Philippines. I will try to integrate the history of the pre-colonial Philippines into the larger history of the movement of monks from China to South and Southeast Asia, while at the same time situating the Philippines in maritime trade networks that connected China—primarily Fujian—and Southeast Asia via nodes that developed in the Philippines. As this paper aims to show, the earliest phase of history is marked by contacts with Buddhists monks and then later Chinese culture and religion began to be transmitted via merchant sojourners. The second part of this paper aims to assess the status of what we know about the history of Buddhism in the Philippines based on some recent archaeological finds that also seem to connect it with larger Sinological issues. There is a paucity of written sources concerning that history, so we will necessarily have to turn to the material record. Finally, I will briefly address the post-colonial contact period of Philippine Buddhist history.

James Robson is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. He has served as Director of Graduate Studies for the Regional Studies East Asia M.A. program. He teaches East Asian religions, in particular Daoism, Chinese Buddhism, and Zen. Robson received his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Stanford University in 2002, after spending many years doing research in China, Taiwan, and Japan. He specializes in the history of medieval Chinese Buddhism and Daoism and is particularly interested in issues of sacred geography, local religious history, talismans, and Chan/Zen Buddhism. He has been engaged in a long-term collaborative research project with the École Française d’Extrême-Orient studying local religious statuary from Hunan province. He is the author of Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak [Nanyue 南嶽] in Medieval China (Harvard, 2009), which was awarded the Stanislas Julien Prize for 2010 by the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres and the 2010 Toshihide Numata Book Prize in Buddhism. Robson is also the author of “Signs of Power: Talismanic Writings in Chinese Buddhism” (History of Religions 48:2), “Faith in Museums: On the Confluence of Museums and Religious Sites in Asia” (PMLA, 2010), and “A Tang Dynasty Chan Mummy [roushen] and a Modern Case of Furta Sacra? Investigating the Contested Bones of Shitou Xiqian.” His current research includes a long term project on the history of the confluence of Buddhist monasteries and mental hospitals in Japan.

Introduction by Minhao Zhai, Assistant Professor of Global China Studies at NYU Shanghai.