2026-06-25 –, Room 201 (Seats 42)
My paper concerns the view of Buddhism as an Asian version of Christianity, which prevailed among the western expatriate community in East Asia from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The conceptual framework of the identity between Christianity and Buddhism was laid down by Timothy Richard (1845-1919), a Welsh Baptist missionary to China. Richard’s mastery of the local language enabled him to read Chinese Buddhist texts and even translate a major Mahayana sutra, Dacheng qixin lun (Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana), into English. His view of Buddhism was enthusiastically shared by Elizabeth Anna Gordon (1851-1925), a British religious scholar who devoted her expatriate life in Japan to researching commonalities between Shingon Buddhism and Early Christianity. While Richard provided evangelists in the Asian mission field with an ideological basis for their efforts to convert local people from the Buddhist faith, Gordon aimed at establishing one universal spiritual discourse that would globally unify all major religions, by tracing the historical and geographical flow of interreligious and intercultural ideas and symbols on a global scale.
In this article, I will first examine the representative books by Richard and Gordon to map out how they exchanged their thoughts and how their work influenced missionaries in Korea. This will be followed by a discussion of the philosophical core of the Christian-Buddhist parallel that they theorized. The last part of the article will focus on the impact of their globality on the emergence of comparative religious studies as a new discipline in East Asia.
Hyangsoon Yi is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia. Her research interests include: intersection of Buddhism, literature, and visual arts; Korean Buddhist nuns; and Buddhism and Western literature. She is the (co-)author or (co-)editor of the following monographs and special journal issues: Life of the Buddha (University of Toronto Press, 2025); Buddhism, Digital Technology and New Media in Korea: Ŭisang’s Ocean Seal Diagram (Routledge, 2024); Tong’asia piguni (Buddhist nuns in East Asia, Minsogwŏn, 2022); Korea Journal: Transnationality of Popular Culture in the Korean Wave 60.1 (2020); Piguni wa Han’guk munhak (Buddhist nuns and Korean literature, Yemunsowŏn, 2008), etc. She has also published over forty book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles.