Vol. 7 of
“Prognostication in History”
Book Title:

Dice and Gods on the Silk Road: Chinese Buddhist Dice Divination in Transcultural Context

Author(s)/Editor(s):

Brandon Dotson, Constance A. Cook, and Zhao Lu

About the Book:

What do dice and gods have in common? What is the relationship between dice divination and dice gambling? This interdisciplinary collaboration situates the tenth-century Chinese Buddhist “Divination of Maheśvara” within a deep Chinese backstory of divination with dice and numbers going back to at least the 4th century BCE. Simultaneously, the authors track this specific method of dice divination across the Silk Road and into ancient India through a detailed study of the material culture, poetics, and ritual processes of dice divination in Chinese, Tibetan, and Indian contexts. The result is an extended meditation on the unpredictable movements of gods, dice, divination books, and divination users across the various languages, cultures, and religions of the Silk Road.

About the Authors:

Dr. Brandon Dotson is an associate professor and Thomas P. McKenna Chair of Buddhist Studies at Georgetown University. He has also taught and researched at Oxford, SOAS, UCSB, and Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. He has also enjoyed research stays in China and Tibet. His work concerns ritual, narrative, and cosmology and the interaction of Buddhist and non-Buddhist traditions in the Tibetan cultural area. In particular, he works closely with Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts to explore the history and culture of the Tibetan Empire (7th to 9th centuries CE).

Dr. Constance Cook is Professor of Chinese and Department Chair at the College of Arts and Sciences, Lehigh University. Her research interests include Ancient Chinese manuscripts and inscriptions from the 2nd millennium BCE up through the 10th century CE, with a specialization in religion, medicine, divination, and ritual practices.

Dr. Zhao Lu is an Assistant Professor of Global China Studies, NYU Shanghai; Global Network Assistant Professor, NYU. He earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied Chinese intellectual and cultural history. Before joining NYU Shanghai, he was a Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2017–2018) and a research fellow at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities (IKGF), at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (2013–2017).

Biographical information of the Book:

Dotson, Brandon, Constance A. Cook, and Zhao Lu. Dice and Gods on the Silk Road: Chinese Buddhist Dice Divination in Transcultural Context. Leiden: Brill, 2021. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004464377

ISBN: 978-90-04-46437-7
Publication Date: 19 Jul 2021
Link to the Publisher:

Brill

Reviews:

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