Brandon Dotson
Associate Professor,College - Department of Theology and Religious Studies， Georgetown University.
University of Oxford - D.Phil
University of Oxford - M.Phil
Wesleyan University - B.A.
Brandon Dotson is associate professor and Thomas P. McKenna Chair of Buddhist Studies. Besides Georgetown, he has 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).
His research involves the creative exploration of boundaries. The boundaries between Buddhism and not Buddhism, center and periphery, life and death, king and god, ritual and narrative, chronicle and epic, and human and animal are those that have most enticed and fascinated me. My investigations into these matters range across the disciplinary boundaries of Religious Studies, Tibetan Studies, Buddhist Studies, Anthropology, Oral Studies, Narratology, and Codicology. My disposition towards curiosity is such that I am not satisfied to merely discover and describe. Much like the processes and phenomena that he study, divination being an apt example, he strive to find meaning, and to relate. It is for this reason that he often seek out or design interdisciplinary and cooperative research and teaching environments. It is also why his work is so often bi-focal, attending to the specifics of a particular problem (e.g., the copying and editing of Tibetan and Chinese sutras), but also relating these to larger processes (e.g., Buddhist conceptions of kingship or the cult of the book). While his work is largely focused on the past, and in particular on the early period of Tibetan Buddhism, it also involves tracing traditions and processes all the way to the present. In the case of sacred kingship, for example, this concerns its place in contemporary religious memory, and in discourses about both secular and religious leadership in postcolonial Buddhist Asia. His research is further informed by a year of fieldwork spent on a Fulbright Grant in China and Tibet (2005–2006), and by his extensive travels in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, Mongolia, and Japan.
专著：
Brandon Dotson, Constance A. Cook, and Zhao Lu. Dice and Gods on the Silk Road: Chinese Buddhist Dice Divination in Transcultural Context.Leiden: Brill, 2021.
Brandon Dotson and Agnieszka Helman-Wazny. Codicology, Paleography, and Orthography of Early Tibetan Documents: Methods and a Case Study.Vienna: Association for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, University of Vienna, 2016.
Brandon Dotson. The Old Tibetan Annals: An Annotated Translation of Tibet's First History.Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2009.
Brandon Dotson."Hunting for Fortune: Wild Animals, Goddesses and the Play of Perspectives in Early Tibetan Dice Divination."Études Mongoles & Sibériennes, Centrasiatiques & Tibétaines, 50(2019): 1-26.
Brandon Dotson. "The Horse and the Grass-Grazing Man: Domestication, Food, and Alterity in Early Tibetan Cosmologies of the Land of the Dead." History of Religions, 57, 3(2018): 270-87.
Brandon Dotson. "On 'Personal Protective Deities' ('go ba'i lha) and the Old Tibetan Verb 'go." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 80, 3(2017): 525-45.
Brandon Dotson. "Misspelling Buddha: the Officially Commissioned Tibetan Aparimitayur-nama mahayana-sutras from Dunhuang and the Study of Old Tibetan Orthography." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 79, 1(2016): 129–51.
Brandon Dotson. "The Dead and Their Stories: Preliminary Remarks on the Place of Narrative in Tibetan Religion."Zentralasiatische Studien, 45(2016): 77–112.
Brandon Dotson. "Failed Prototypes: Foliation and Numbering in Ninth-Century Tibetan Satasahasrika-prajñaparamita-sutras."Journal Asiatique, 301, 1(2015): 153–64.
Brandon Dotson. "Naming the King: Accession, Death, and Afterlife Through the Re- Un- and Nick-Naming of Tibet’s Kings."C ahiers d’Extrême-Asie, 24(2015): 1-27.
Brandon Dotson. "The Remains of the Dharma: Editing, Rejecting, and Replacing the Buddha’s Words in Officially Commissioned Sutras from Dunhuang, 820s to 840s." Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, 36-37(2014): 5–68.
Brandon Dotson."The Unhappy Bride and Her Lament."Journal of the International Association for Bon Research, 1(2013): 199–225.
Brandon Dotson."Theorising the King: Implicit and Explicit Sources for the Study of Tibetan Sacred Kingship."Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, 21(2011): 83–103.
Brandon Dotson."Chapter 4 Archaisms And The Transmission Of The Dba’ Bzhed."Bringing Buddhism To Tibet,edited by Lewis Doney, 64-74. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. DOI:10.1515/9783110715309-004.
Brandon Dotson. "Three Dice, Four Faces, and Sixty-Four Combinations: Early Tibetan Dice Divination by the Numbers."Glimpses of Tibetan Divination, Past and Present,edited by Donatella Rossi, Petra Maurer, and Rolf Scheuermann, 11–48. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
Brandon Dotson. "A Fragment of an Early Tibetan Divination Board from Mīrān."Unearthing Himalayan Treasures: Festschrift for Franz-Karl Ehrhard,edited by Volker Caumanns, Marta Sernesi, and Nikolai Solmsdorf, 165–87. Marburg: Indica et Tibetica Verlag, 2019.
Brandon Dotson. "The Emanated Emperor and his Cosmopolitan Contradictions."Faith and Empire: the Art of Politics in Tibetan Buddhism,edited by Karl Debreczeny, 69–81. New York: Rubin Museum of Art, 2019.
Brandon Dotson. "Introducing Early Tibetan Law: Codes and Cases."Secular Law and Order in the Tibetan Highland,267–314. Andiast: International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, 2015.
Brandon Dotson. "Popular Wisdom in the Margins of the Perfection of Wisdom: on the Structure and Date of Tibet’s Oldest Collection of Proverbs."The Illuminating Mirror: Festschrift for Per K. Sørensen on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday,119–30. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2015.
Brandon Dotson. "The Call of the Cuckoo to the Thin Sheep Of Spring: Healing and Fortune in Old Tibetan Dice Divination Texts."Tibetan and Himalayan Healing: An Anthology for Anthony Aris,148–60. Kathmandu: Vajra Publications, 2015.
Brandon Dotson. "The Princess and the Yak: the Hunt as Narrative Trope and Historical Reality."Scribes, Texts, and Rituals in Early Tibet and Dunhuang,Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2013.
Brandon Dotson. "At the Behest of the Mountain: Gods, Clans and Political Topography in Post-Imperial Tibet."Old Tibetan Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Professor Ronald E. Emmerick (1937–2001),157–202. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
Brandon Dotson. "On the Old Tibetan Term Khrin in the Legal and Ritual Lexicons."Himalayan Languages and Linguistics: Studies in Phonology, Semantics, Morphology and Syntax,77–97. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
Brandon Dotson: Georgetown University https://gufaculty360.georgetown.edu/s/contact/00336000014SlSxAAK/brandon-dotson
