Acknowledgements
The present volume comprises the proceedings of the ERC-funded BuddhistRoad project’s third and final conference, “Establishing of Buddhist Nodes in Eastern Central Asia 6th to 14th c. Part III: Impacts of Non-Buddhist Influences and Doctrines.” This conference was convened by Lewis Doney and took place online and at the Ruhr University Bochum (Germany) between the 12th and 14th of July, 2021, and he would like to thank Franziska Burstyn for her help with the organisation.
The conference convenor and book editors are grateful to all the conference participants for making it a rich and lively event, despite the distance between us dictated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and to those participants who were able to contribute fine pieces of scholarship to the present volume and helped immensely throughout the editing process. This process was also aided by the hard work of our heroes behind the scenes. We are particularly grateful to Vivien Staps, Tanja Heilig, and Ben Müller for their energy and attention to detail, to Joseph Leach, Dawn Collins, and Dylan Esler for proofreading several contributions between them, to Licia Di Giacinto for liasing with excellent peer-reviewers and to the publication team at Brill, headed by Boris van Gool with the able assistance of Irene Jager.
We hope that readers enjoy and benefit from the work in this collective volume, and that it inspires future work on the rich intersections between Buddhism and non-Buddhist traditions, texts, and communities in Eastern Central Asia, and especially as reflected in and motivated by complex doctrinal concerns.
Lewis Doney
Carmen Meinert
Henrik H. Sørensen
Yukiyo Kasai
Bochum, December 11th, 2023