Associate Professor of Religious Studies

Overview

On Sabbatical Leave until Spring 2027
Fulbright Scholar, Taiwan AY25-26
ACLS Fellow F'26

Jason Protass is a historian of Chinese Buddhism. He specializes in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, the period of the Northern Song (960-1127) and its legacies. His most recent publication is the co-edited volume Countless Sands: Medieval Buddhists and their Environments (2025). His first book, The Poetry Demon: Song-dynasty Monks on Verse and the Way (2021), examines Buddhist monks' understanding of Chinese poetry and its relationships to the Buddhist path. Protass has published additional essays and chapters on Buddhist monks' poetry, including "The Flavors of Monks' Poetry: On a Witty Disparagement and Its Influences" (2021), "Buddhist Fund-Raising Poems and Other Lost Verses" (2023), and "The Plum-Blossom Monk: Jichan" (2025).

Protass currently is developing two book-length projects. One project is a Buddhist history of China's rivers, an environmental history of the Buddhist built environment along the lower Yangzi and tidal rivers of Fujian. The other book-length project focuses on Chan teachings for laypersons in the Northern Song, centered on the excavated woodblock text, Quanhuawen, essays for lay practice composed by Changlu Zongze (d. 1106). That project emerges from a broader interest in recovering the history of the Yunmen lineage of Chan Buddhism. His related work includes a geographic history of Chan lineages during the Northern Song (2016 & 2019); on the relationships between printed books and manuscripts in the Song. Protass also maintains an interest in the connected history of Chan and Zen, and has also written about translingual encounters in the thirteenth and fourthteenth centuries between Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen monks (2022), as well as the Brill Encyclopedia of Buddhism entry for the Song Dynasty (2023).

Protass has studied at Academia Sinica (Taipei), Hanazono University (Kyoto), Ryūkoku University (Kyoto), and Peking University (Beijing) under the auspices of fellowships from Fulbright Taiwan (x2), American Council of Learned Societies (x2), Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai (Japan), and the Ministry of Education P. R. China.

Brown Affiliations

Research Areas