Acknowledgments
The present volume emerges from the conference “From the Silk to the Book Road(s): Networks of Commerce, Artifacts, and Books Between Central and East Asia,” organized by the international research project From the Ground Up: Buddhism and East Asian Religions and held at the University of California, Berkeley on 21–23 September, 2018. We are deeply grateful to the conference participants whose papers appear in the present volume, and to the translators who worked hard to bring these works to an English-language readership. For their ongoing support and guidance, we are indebted to Jinhua Chen and Vicky Baker, Project Director and Project Manager, respectively, of From the Ground Up: Buddhism and East Asian Religions, which is based at the University of British Columbia. We are appreciative of Patricia Radder’s ongoing support for this project at Brill, and for the valuable feedback provided by the peer reviewer of the volume.
We thank Irene Jager for expertly seeing us through the production process at Brill. This project could not have been completed without funding from the T’ang Studies Society and From the Ground Up: Buddhism and East Asian Religions, which we gratefully acknowledge.
For her excellent copyediting and indexing, we would like to thank Cynthia Col. We are also grateful for the additional editorial assistance of Sarah Fink and Suna Cha. For help with translation questions, our thanks go to Kristopher Kersey, Lan Wu, and Weiyu Lin.
Michelle Wang extends deepest thanks to her husband Ernest Baroni for his support and assistance, Ren Wei and Geng Yi for their help with image permissions, and colleagues at Georgetown University for their valuable input. Ryan Overbey would like to thank his partner, Christine Fernsebner Eslao, for her invaluable moral support, as well as his colleagues in the Religious Studies and Asian Studies programs at Skidmore College.
Michelle C. Wang and Ryan Richard Overbey
May 2023