Keynote Speakers

Professor Lancaster is the founder and Director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI). ECAI (www.ecai.org) is promoting worldwide electronic access to quality research data. ECAI is a partnership of technical specialists and the scholarly community dedicated to the support of scholarship through technology. ECAI is building an infrastructure for retrieval of data over the Internet from servers located anywhere in the world. Guided by the paradigm of the historical atlas, research data is indexed by time and place using temporally-enabled Geographic Information Systems software. User queries retrieve and display data in GIS layers on a map-based interface, allowing comparisons across discipline, region, and time.

Dr. Lancaster has published over 55 articles and reviews and has edit­ed or authored numerous books including Prajnaparamita and Related Systems, The Korean Buddhist Canon, Buddhist Scrip­tures, Early Ch’an in China and Tibet, and Assimilation of Buddhism in Korea.

Professor Bingenheimer was born in Germany. He obtained an MA (Sinology) and Dr. Phil (History of Religions) from Würzburg University and an MA (Communication Studies) from Nagoya University. Marcus currently works as Associate Professor at Temple University, Philadelphia. From 2005 to 2011 he taught Buddhism and Digital Humanities at Dharma Drum 法鼓山, Taiwan, where he also supervised various projects concerning the digitization of Buddhist culture.

His main research interests are the history of Buddhism in East Asia and early Buddhist sutra literature. Currently, he is working on two very different kinds of texts: Āgama literature and Ming-Qing dynasty temple gazetteers. Next to that, Marcus is interested in the Digital Humanities and how to do research in the age of digital information.

Professor Muller teaches Buddhism, East Asian thought, and Digital Humanities at the University of Tokyo. He is the founder and chief editor of the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism, its companion Chinese-Japanese-Korean-Vietnamese/English Dictionary. He is also the founder and managing editor of the scholarly network H-Buddhism. His primary fields of research are Korean Buddhism and East Asian Yogācāra/Tathāgatagarbha thought, along with occasional forays into Zen, Confucianism, and Daoism.

Recent publications include Korea's Great Buddhist-Confucian Debate: The Treatises of Chŏng Tojŏn (Sambong) and Hamhŏ Tŭkt’ong (Kihwa)(2015), A Korean-English Dictionary of Buddhist Terms (2014), and Wŏnhyo's Philosophy of Mind (2011). A full listing of his books and articles on these topics can be accessed through his web site, Resources for East Asian Language and Thought.

Venerable Dr. Juewei is the Director of Nan Tien Institute’s Humanistic Buddhism Centre and Lecturer at the Institute’s Applied Buddhist Studies program. Her research interests include Humanistic Buddhism, Buddhist acculturation, and Buddhist issues in modern society, including Buddhist Economics and Buddhist Ethics. Besides research, she also teaches classes such as Buddhism and Modern Society, Buddhist Ethics and subjects related to Chinese Buddhism.

Through the Humanistic Buddhism Centre, Ven. Juewei heads up a worldwide tour, ‘Buddha’s Birthday Education Project (BBEP)’ that connects past and present, east and west. BBEP has now been staged in ten places around the world, bringing research to life through art, music, and technology. Since 2017, she has also initiated the collection and publication of real-life humanistic applications of Buddhist teachings in www.facebook.com/turningpointsstories and started podcasting on soundcloud.com/nti-hbc.

Ven. Juewei is an active member of the Fo Guang Shan Buddhist order. She has held many international positions within the order’s University Consortium and Temples, including University of the West and Hsi Lai Temple in California, USA, and Australia’s Nan Tien Temple.

Venerable Miao Guang is the Personal English Interpreter of Venerable Master Hsing Yun. She also serves as the English Secretary at Fo Guang Shan Founding Master’s Office. She graduated with a Bachelor degree from the Department of Asian Studies, University of New South Wales and went on to complete her Master in Buddhist Studies at Fo Guang University. She is currently serving as the Deputy-Chancellor at Fo Guang Shan Institute of Humanistic Buddhism, and the Director of the Center of International Affairs. She is also the Director of the Fo Guang Dictionary of Buddhism Translation Project.