Acknowledgments
The inspiration for this volume arose from a series of conferences that took place around the world between 2015 and 2017, starting with the “International Workshop on Traditional Sciences in Asia 2015: An Interdisciplinary Investigation into Overlapping Cosmologies” (June 17–19, 2015) and culminating in the “International Conference on Traditional Sciences in Asia 2017: East-West Encounter in the Science of Heaven and Earth” (October 25–28, 2017), both hosted by Kyoto University under the auspices of the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research and the Institute for Research in the Humanities, supported by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Project ID #15K01118, #15KK0050). During these many meetings, researchers from different fields and backgrounds intensely debated and discussed ideas of overlapping cosmologies, proving the value of bringing together diverse interdisciplinary and transcultural approaches like the ones in this volume. Readers interested in additional outcomes of these conferences may wish to consult the proceedings of a 2017 conference published in Bill M. Mak and Tokimasa Takeda, eds., East-West Encounter in the Science of Heaven and Earth 天と地の科学 (Kyoto: Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University, 2019).