Acknowledgements
Several of the contributions of the present volume are based on the international conference âEarly Chán Manuscripts among the DÅ«nhuáng Findings,â organized by the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (Oslo University), September 28thâOctober 2nd, 2009, in cooperation with the Institute for Research in the Humanities, KyÅto University. The conveners Christoph Anderl (presently: Ghent University) and Christian Wittern (KyÅto University) are very grateful for the grants provided by the Norwegian Research Council (NFR) and the Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation for Scholarly Exchange (CCK), Taipei (Taiwan), generously supporting the scholarly gathering; as well as for the organizational help by the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. Financial support for the final editing of the manuscript was provided by the University of British Columbia project From the Ground Up: Buddhism and East Asian Religions, sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, and the Tianzhu Foundation.
We also want to thank the participants of the conference, and the other scholars represented in this book, who contributed their fine pieces of scholarship to the present volume. The publication of this volume was delayed several timesâfor various reasonsâand we apologize to the contributors who had to update their papers several times in order to integrate recent scholarship. We are deeply grateful for their patience.
We are also grateful to Brill Academic Publishing (Leiden) for accepting the volume in the Numen series, and in particular Tessa Schild for her continuous support during the publication process. Many thanks also to Pim Rietbroek (Leiden) for solving problems with the Tangut fonts, Philip Parr (London) for proofreading several of the papers, and Shan Bai (Ghent) for her help with editing the bibliographies.
Last but not least, our sincere thanks to two anonymous reviewers who kindly offered numerous suggestions to improve the volume as a whole.
We hope that this book contributes to our understanding of Early Chán in intra-religious and interreligious contexts, and of the processes and transformations which shaped the development of Chán in the Medieval Northwestern and Northern regions.
Christoph Anderl and Christian Wittern
Ghent and KyÅto, March 31st, 2020