Buddhism in World History

Theme: Religion & Religious Studies

Published: 2 June 2026

Summary
Johan Elverskog, SCAS Fellow and professor at Southern Methodist University, discusses his research arguing that Buddhism must be understood as a world-historical force shaping economics, politics and environment across Inner Asia. He critiques the modern “romantic orientalist” view of Buddhism - mindfulness-focused and nonviolent - showing historically it involved violence, political action, resource extraction and elite economic support for monastics. Johan Elverskog outlines Buddhist doctrinal developments, stresses the critical monk–laity relationship, and examines environmental impacts of monastery building. He describes his work on Uyghur Buddhism and a new synthetic history of the Mongols, arguing religion must be central in historical and contemporary analyses.

Keywords
Buddhism, world history, religion, religious politics, Inner Asia

Suggested Link/s
About: Johan Elverskog
A History of Uyghur Buddhism External link, opens in new window. (Columbia University Press, 2024)

Transcript of the Episode

Johan Elverskog 0:09
So now people, they understand that Buddhism has violence. But all these other things that scholars are doing, haven't necessarily percolated down, like the connection with economic system, the connection with political systems, the connection with the environment. And so that's what my scholarship was trying to push that agenda to say, the romantic orientalist modern Buddhism, now let's say there's anything wrong with it. I mean, religions change all the time.And there's many wonderful things about the mindfulness tradition and all the rest of it. But it's important to understand that this is a modern thing. There wasn't mindfulness in sixth century China's, for example. And so if we understand Buddhist history and its connection with Asian history, we need to be more clear eyed about it.

Natalie von der Lehr 0:55
Welcome to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. My name is Natalie von der Lehr, and in this episode I talk to Johan Elverskog, Dedman Family Distinguished Professor, Professor of Religious Studies, and, by courtesy, Professor of History at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is a fellow at SCAS during this academic year, 2025/2026, and his research focuses on different aspects of the history of Buddhism, and we're going to talk about some of his work today. And this is the first episode in our theme "Religion and Religious Studies”. Very welcome to SCAS Talks.

Johan Elverskog 1:32
Well, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Natalie von der Lehr 1:34
Thank you. Would you like to say a few more words about yourself?

Johan Elverskog 1:37
I thank you for that kind introduction, and I think the most important thing to say is that what makes this all possible, all my work, is that I've been happily married for 31 years.

Natalie von der Lehr 1:46
That's very interesting.

Johan Elverskog 1:48
Yeah, I mean, I think in academics we always talk about, like, oh, I studied here, I did this, my mentor was that, and I wrote that book, and, but, you know, we're embedded in social relations, and my family is important. It's, you know, made possible, all the work that I've done.

Natalie von der Lehr 2:01
That's very nice that you acknowledge them. Very briefly then, what is your research about?

Johan Elverskog 2:06
My research covers kind of a lot of terrain, both temporally and spatially, but, I mean, if you're going to boil it down into a nutshell, it'd be kind of like the title of this talk, which I guess is "Buddhism in World History". And so I kind of try to make the argument that Buddhism is a world historical force. And so I do it particularly by, my region of focus is Inner Asia, which perfectly kind of connects east and west and north and south. And so looking how Buddhism has shaped economic and political forces as it spread from Sri Lanka to Siberia and Afghanistan to Japan.

Natalie von der Lehr 2:40
And if I understood it correctly, you look at a quite long time period also.

Johan Elverskog 2:44
Yeah, it depends on what I'm working on. I mean, so my earlier work, I guess, my dissertation work was particularly focused on China and the Ming-Ching period, from 14th century to the 19th century. And that was more kind of temporally contained, so to speak. And I guess that's what, you know, when you start as a young academic, you don't swing for the fences or you don't have the capacity or gumption to do that. But after I had done that work I kind of swung for the fences and did Buddhism and Islam, which kind of went from 500 BCE up to the 19th century. And I've kind of maintained that kind of focus with most of my recent work as well.

Natalie von der Lehr 3:21
How come that you became interested in this topic to start off with?

Johan Elverskog 3:24
That's a long, complicated answer, you know, with many personal and academic twists and turns. But the short answer is, I was a Swedish immigrant, moved to the States in the 80s. And I guess I kind of had a jaundiced view of what was going on there in the Reagan era. And I guess I wanted to have kind of a way out, so to speak. And as very often happens in America, you become kind of a spiritual seeker. And, you know, my undergraduate at Berkeley, I became very interested in the Buddhist tradition. I mean, now I kind of look back at it and I would call myself a romantic orientalist - in a good way. But that kind of drove me to be interested in the Buddhist tradition and then I went and studied in Asia and then kind of my interest shifted as a result of that. And particularly towards the historical as opposed to anything else.

Natalie von der Lehr 4:08
Almost everybody has heard about Buddhism and you just said "romantic orientalist". I brought this little Buddha guy along. I got it as a present actually from a friend who said, if you get it as a present, it's good luck.

Johan Elverskog 4:19
And you're supposed to rub the belly, it's good luck.

Natalie von der Lehr 4:22
I should do that. But everybody sort of has an idea about Buddhism and has some idea of what it entails. But could you remind us about the basics?

Johan Elverskog 4:30
Yeah, that's like a, a 15 hour question, I think, but to boil it down, again, I approach the tradition historically, so I think it's important to put the Buddhist tradition in its historical context, around 500 BCE. I mean, conventionally, scholars call it the Axial Age, many, things were happening in India at that time in particular. There was introduction of iron technology, which made better weapons, better agricultural increased urbanization, rise of larger political entities or states, and also the introduction of money. Kind of like now, the introduction of AI, we had to make sense - what's going on, and at the same time, there were these four kind of new religious ideas that came into the South Asian world, which was reincarnation, you know, connected with the theory of karma, and, also this kind of, underlying ontological reality, that the world is filled with suffering, or dukkha, and therefore the goal of life was liberation, or to get out of the cycle of birth and death. And so all of these thinkers were kind of dealing with these issues, and you could put it like, what was the meaning of life? So the Hindu thinkers, they came up with various interpretations, and, you know, encapsulated in these scriptures called the Upanishads, Mahavira, the founder of the Jain tradition, had his own kind of understanding of how reincarnation and karma and liberation work, and the Buddha had his own interpretation. They're all dealing with the same kind of four major issues: How does karma work, and how do you get out of the cycle? And the Buddha has the most radical idea. Pretty much all of the other thinkers at this time came up with the idea of the Atman, or the soul. Everybody has a soul, and it's this soul, that, you know, conventional idea of karma, we do something bad, we'll have a bad rebirth the next time around. And the Buddha turned this whole idea completely on its head, and made the argument that there is no soul. I mean, this is the famous An-Atman, or the theory of no self. And this is a very, very radical idea. But in a nutshell, he basically says our major kind of epistemological mistake that we make is that we assume that we are inherent, permanent self, and as a result, we have desires, we have wants, we have attachments. And as a result of these, we go out and do things to acquire things, and that drives the cycle of karma production. And so the karma production is what produces future rebirths. And those future rebirths will, of course, suffer as well. And so as a compassionate, caring human being, what you should want to do is end that suffering. And the only way to do that is to realize no self through meditation practice. And when you realize no self, according to the Buddha, you no longer produce karma, right? It's kind of ontological state of being. So you no longer produce karma. So there's no future rebirth, and as a result, there's no suffering. And of course, that's the end goal of Nirvana. It's much more complicated than that, but that's kind of a nutshell summation.

Natalie von der Lehr 7:14
Yes. This is the basics. You have studied Buddhism for many, many years and the history of Buddhism. What more do you think we should know? And I'm thinking about "we" as educated citizens, scholars. What should we have in mind when we think about Buddhism?

Johan Elverskog 7:30
Yeah, I called myself a romantic orientalist. I think pretty much everybody, when you say "we", the kind of the popular conceptualization of the Dharma is very, it is this romantic construction, as we call it in the academic world, which was created in the 19th century and continued through the 20th century. This was done by a whole cast of characters, including, you know, British imperial officers, secular humanists, Russian theosophists, Asian nationalists. You know, they call it the construction of Buddhism, the construction of modern Buddhism or Protestant Buddhism or whatever, you want to call it. And this is the kind of Buddhism that we see in the popular imagination. This is the tradition of mindfulness and it's all about meditation. And, what scholars have been doing for the last 30 years is basically going back and, well, pointing out that this is kind of a modern creation. This kind of started with, this famous book called “The Curators of the Buddha” edited by Donna Lopez, which kind of brought the post-colonial turn to the study of Buddhism. And since then, Buddhist scholars have gone back and said, oh, you know, everybody thought Buddhism was nonviolent. And then of course, scholars go back and say, no, it's filled with violence and political action and destruction. And of course that's confirmed by, we see kind of the ethnic cleansing in, Burma, or Myanmar and Sri Lanka today. And so the kind of the problem or the way I see it is what happens in the ivory tower, it takes 30 years to kind of percolate down to the popular conceptualization. So now people, I think even on the street, so to speak, they understand that Buddhism has violence. But all these other things that scholars are doing, haven't necessarily percolated down, like the connection with economic system, the connection with political systems, the connection with the environment. But hopefully this will percolate down. And so that's what my scholarship was trying to push that agenda to say, the romantic orientalist modern Buddhism, now let's say there's anything wrong with it. I mean, religions change all the time.And there's many wonderful things about the mindfulness tradition and all the rest of it. But it's important to understand that this is a modern thing. There wasn't mindfulness in sixth century China's, for example. And so if we understand Buddhist history and its connection with Asian history, we need to be more clear eyed about it. And that's what my scholarship tries to do.

Natalie von der Lehr 9:40
In another interview with you, I read that only very few professional historians focus on religion in general. Why should they start to do that?

Johan Elverskog 9:49
Because I think religion matters. That would be the, the short answer. As you said, in the introduction, this is the first time that you're doing a SCAS Talks on religion and religious studies. And I remember I was at CASPIS at Stanford. And they give us the folder when you come there. giving all the information of housing and talks and whatnot, the lunch program. And on the cover, they had the big themes that they did, anthropology, history, social science, know, sociology, whatever. And of course there was no religion. And of course I had to stand up and say, well, why is religion not here? Religion matters. And again, you can pick up the newspaper and nobody picks up the newspaper, you read online. But religion is everywhere. But as a result of kind of the academy being built on the modernization and the kind of developmental, and of course the secularization thesis, religion was kind of thrown in the garbage heap of history. Religion was stupid. It was ridiculous. It was made up. Why should we care about it? It's going to go away anyway. But of course it's important now. I mean, look what's happening in the Middle East or American politics. I mean, if, 70% of white evangelicals vote for President Trump what does that tell us? You know, and again, talking about other scholars, religious studies was created as a field only in the 1960s since we were the, the kind of academic weirdos who said, well, religion matters. And the field was created because political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians weren't doing it. But of course now I think all of these fields, if you're a political scientist, doing geopolitics, how can you not know the difference between Shia and Sunni and what that means? Or, you know, or Nigeria, which was bombed by the United States on Christmas Day of all days, dealing with Christian Muslim tensions. I think anybody in any field, sociology, political science, anthropology, we need to take religion seriously because it hasn't been, I don't think we can understand the human condition unless we put it on the front burner. It doesn't mean everybody has to do it and it's not the most important thing, but it definitely has to be part of the conversation. And I think for too long it hasn't been.

Natalie von der Lehr 11:43
You have studied a very long time period of Buddhism, as you've already said, But what is sort of persistent, and what kind of changes can you see during this period?

Johan Elverskog 11:52
Yeah, I think I can answer that, like, in a two-fold way. I mean, one thing that's important to highlight, I just gave kind of a, a thumbnail sketch of the early Buddhist tradition. But as with every religious tradition, it changed widely over the course of the, of the millennia. And, now there are three major groups, denominations, whatever you wanna call it, much like, as I tell my students, it's like the Christian tradition. There's Protestants, Catholics, and the Orthodox. And in, the Buddhist tradition, there's the Theravada tradition, which kind of calls itself the Orthodox, the original teaching, which is found in South Asia. Then there's the Mahayana tradition, which developed about five, six hundred years later, which is the predominant tradition, practice in East Asia. China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam. and then there's the, the tantric tradition, which developed about a thousand years after the time of the Buddha, and that's the tradition that's found in Tibet and in China and Japan in various forms, but most famously in in Tibet. And these are much the same as in Christian tradition. They all look back to the founder, but they have very different understandings of doctrine, ritual, practice, and again, in the modern West, in this kind of romantic, orientalist construction, they all get kind of mashed together, and I think historically it's important to tease out the differences and why they're different, so that's the first part of that, I want to answer the question. And the second is the consistency. So even though there's this wide theological difference between these tradition, the one constant element in the Buddhist tradition is the relationship between the monks and the laity. And this is, as I tell my students, the Buddha is kind of like a social engineer coming up with the institution of monasticism was a, kind of a stroke of genius. And so the monastics are the ones who historically, they were the ones who were seeking liberation and meditating. But what made their lives possible is, is that the majority of people who had identified as Buddhists lived in the world, had families, had jobs, made money, and they gave money to the monks so they could live their ascetic lifestyle. And historically the, relationship between this, like there was the population was about 1% monastic and 99%, lay people. And again, my historical approach, using contemporary jargon, I say, it's interesting to look at the 1%, but if you really want to understand Buddhist history, you have to look at the 99%. What were they doing? And I think too often because of this modern view of Buddhism, it's like, you know, the defining element of Buddhism is meditation, which is what monks did. But historically, even monks, very, very few monks actually did the meditation. And so what I, argue in my work is that we have to open the aperture. Yes, you can read Buddhist texts, you can look at what monks were doing and nuns, what they were doing. But to really understand Buddhism as a historical force, we really need to look at, the laity who made their lives possible. And of course, what they were doing is they were making money, in order to build all these beautiful Buddhist temples and monasteries that you see across Asia and the West today.

Natalie von der Lehr 14:46
I'm a little bit interested in the environmental issues. Can we go a little bit into that? So how has Buddhism influenced the environment or environmental issues? Nowadays, I mean, it's very popular to talk about sustainability and climate changes and so on.

Johan Elverskog 15:02
Yeah, I mean, and again, Buddhism has been very successful in kind of selling itself as this, you know, wonderful, progressive, secular humanist philosophy, and which is the kind of thing that, scholars have been pushing back against for 30 years, that it's, you know, it's a religion and all of that, that entails. But one of the, you know, I said, like now, most people recognize that Buddhist has a violent tradition, but kind of the view that Buddhism is inherently environmental, is deeply, deeply ingrained. And it's kind of like the third rail, as I call it. I mean, I published this book on the Buddhist footprint and the environmentalists of Asia. And, I wasn't saying anything new by saying that Buddhism is not inherently environmental. I mean, other scholars like Lambert Schmithausen and Malcolm Eckel and Ian Harris had made this argument for 20 years, so I wasn't pointing out anything new. And I was just taking my scholarship in a new direction, but there was immediate reaction, like what, how can you say Buddhism is not environmental? And my argument is, is that, yes, nowadays, Buddhist tradition has adopted Western environmental discourses very successfully. And this goes all the way back to the 60s or even earlier with D. T. Suzuki and, you know, view of Zen and its, you know, appreciation of nature. But again, historically, the Buddhist tradition had no respect for nature. And again, I'm not making this argument by myself. There's a whole coterie of scholars who have confirmed this by looking at Buddhist texts. What I did in my own work is like, okay, well, that's a starting point, but let's ask the question, well, what did they actually do? That's the environmental historical, question. And so what I traced out is the Buddhist tradition as it's spread across Asia. And again, it's going back to the, the social relationship between the monastic and the laity. In order for the system to function, there has to be overproduction of wealth, right? I mean, you can make, grow enough food for yourself, but then you also need to, know, support the monks. And so the built into the system is this over extraction. And so I think that's an important, you know, to understand the expansion of Buddhism across Asia, that it was very much involved in extracting resources, and in particularly through agriculture.

Natalie von der Lehr 17:05
Yes. Now, because you see this Buddhist temples and sites that are very, very beautiful. And they must've been built of something, right?

Johan Elverskog 17:13
Yeah, I mean, I think it's always kind of amazing, you know, you look at like the Potila Palace in Lhasa, the home of the Dalai Lama built by the, the great fifth Dalai Lama in the 17th century, it's a thousand rooms, the towers over Lhasa. I mean, there's no trees in Lhasa, and there's one reason that there's no trees in Lhasa, is because they've all been cut to build monasteries. I mean, there was famous juniper, these large junipers in Lhasa. But according to tantric architectural models monasteries needed to be built of juniper. And so, of course, the Buddhists cut down all the juniper trees, to build the temples all over Tibet that everybody likes to admire, and rightfully so. But in order to do that, you had to cut down the juniper trees. And already in the 14th century, the sandstorms were so bad in Lhasa, because, of course, they had deforested the whole basin, that they had to start planting trees. And this was one of the monastic leaders at that time, said, oh, in order to deal with the sandstorms, let's plant trees along the river. But so they knew that they had already destroyed their environment, and it was having, immediate impact on their life in the 14th century. And so again, if you look at the Potsella Palace, yes, we can admire it, it's a remarkable building. But again, that took an enormous amount of money, enormous amount of resources, and where did that all come from? You know, in the pre-modern world, it came through extraction of natural resources. Buddhists did this, right? And so Buddhists impacted the environment in Tibet, and you can go to Burabudur, you can go to Todaiji in, in Japan, or wherever. All of these glorious monuments that people fly around the world to look at, they came at the expense of the natural world. I mean, not at the scale that it is in the modern world, but again, to understand the environmental history of Asia, we have to understand that creating a Buddhist landscape or Buddhist space involved transforming the natural world, and that's what environmental history is.

Natalie von der Lehr 19:01
Your most recent book is called History of Uyghur Buddhism. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Johan Elverskog 19:07
Yeah, sure, I'd be happy to. This is kind of a follow-up. My first book that I ever published was in 1997, was, a kind of a survey, or not just kind of, it was a survey and catalog of all of the known at that time, Uyghur Buddhist manuscripts to kind of give, you know, a lay of the land, like, what have they translated, what have they produced, to give an understanding of what, what Uyghur Buddhism was. And, as invariably happens in American academia, I was not going to get a job in any university of being an Uyghur Buddhist specialist. And so one of my colleagues advised, wisely told me, don't continue down that path. And I didn't, I went off and did other things. But I was always interested in it. I mean, again, I readily admit when I was an undergraduate or living in Asia, I'd never heard about, you know, Buddhism among the Turks. And most people haven't heard about it, but it was fascinating when I learned about it in graduate school and I kind of fell down that rabbit hole. But again, as I said, I put it off to the side. But then of course, when, the horrific things started happening in Xinjiang, beginning in 2017 and the camps and, unbelievable persecution of, of the Uyghurs, I figured it was time to go back to this. I mean, I don't know if I had kind of like a moral compunction, to go back to this, material, and so what I did is instead of, you know, I had my historical or my textual background, but then I put it in the broader historical frame. Again, addressing the issues that all my other work does is like the importance of religion in Asian history, the importance of Buddhism in Asian history. And again, how does Buddhism connect to political relations between the Uyghurs and, and China, Uyghurs and Tibet, Uyghurs and the Mongols. Teasing out, again, the economic, elements that maintain the Buddhist community. Again, it takes a lot of money and the Uyghurs were famous. They were the merchants on the Silk Road. They made a lot of money. And that's why we had these remarkable, artifacts, you know, manuscripts and statues and paintings, again, which take a lot of money. You need to get lapis lazuli from Afghanistan to paint the paintings, and all this other stuff. Again, so this resource extraction that makes it possible. So the Uyghurs, you know, it's a perfect test case, so to speak, of looking at, you know, my interest in inner Asia as this kind of conduit to, grapple with the kind of intertwined issues that I'm interested in, on religion and history and, you know, and how it drives political and economic systems.

Natalie von der Lehr 21:28
What sort of parallels can you draw from your historical studies to today?

Johan Elverskog 21:34
You know, we have the popular view of Buddhist mindfulness, and it's kind of, like, disconnected from the material world, but, I mean, there's an old joke in Buddhist studies, it's like, you know, the Buddhist tradition is known as the, as the middle way, but, Buddhist studies scholars joke that it should actually be known as the upper middle way. Pointing out that who is a Buddhist? It's rich white people, particularly in the West, I mean, they're the ones who have the resources in order to jet off to a meditation retreat on Maui, and that's always been the case. I mean, it's like a standard kind of, component of Buddhist history writing now is that it was the merchant elite, who adopted Buddhism for ideological and, economic reasons. And that's still very much the case, and so I think, you know, we need to recognize, this kind of connection, everybody Buddhism is all about, you know, anti-materialism or anti-consumerism, and yes, that's there, and it's, the lifestyle of the monk, but again, the 99% of the other one, you know, the laity, they're making money, to support the monks, and so we need to put that in the mix, And politically, I mean, again, you know, I can talk about politics in the Ming Dynasty or the Qing period, you know, Buddhism and state power, but it's the same now. I mean, you look at Burma or Myanmar, you look at Sri Lanka, you look at Thailand, and, you this, in Tibet or China, you look the feud between the Dalai Lama, I mean, you know, it's kind of crazy to think that, you know, the Chinese Communist Party is going to decide who the next reincarnated Dalai Lama is. I mean, it's like, what's going on? An atheist organization deciding on reincarnation lineages, but so, you know, Buddhism is still very much part of the mix, and again, one of my, go-to stories in this regard is, with the PRC and Burma relations, you know, obviously, which are very tense, but, you know, when they wanted to start these negotiations in the, in the 50s, or kind of like, lower the temperature, so to speak, one of the things that the PRC government gave a tooth relic of the Buddha to go around Burma, I mean, so, like, contemporary geopolitics are inherently intertwined with the Buddhist tradition now, but again, you read a history of the modern PRC, Buddhism is not going to be there, even though Buddhism is now exploding in China, and again, very much it's connected with the rich, wealthy elite, and Buddhism is kind of, a prosperity gospel, and there's all these rituals you can do to make more money, and all this other stuff, and so, So, the issues that I talk about historically, I think are all present now, but I guess, because of this modern view of Buddhism as being disconnected from these things, it's not front and center, but I think if you want to write, or talk about Asia, know, Buddhism should be there. And again, we see it all the time, and, you know, stories pops up here and there. So, I think there's definitely connections.

Natalie von der Lehr 24:14
What are you working on right now?

Johan Elverskog 24:16
Right now, here, I have the glorious chance of having the peace and solitude of being a SCAS fellow, which is a remarkable gift, and my, what I'm going back to is, my beloved Mongols. I mean, again, I talked about going back and working on Ughyur history, but kind of my loadstar for the last two decades has been the history of the Mongols, again, kind of the centering, Eurasian history through the lens of the Mongols. And so this, what I'm working on is a synthetic comprehensive history of the Mongols from the beginning, until the contemporary period. Because I think the man on the street, or the woman on the street, has kind of this view of the Mongols. There's Djingis Khan, kind of comes out of nowhere, creates this massive empire, the world's largest, you know, land empire, and then they disappear. And I think there's more to the story. I mean, there's centuries before Djingis Khan arrived on the scene, and then there's centuries after the empire collapsed. And so I want to give the more broader, fuller history of the Mongols. And of course, you know, touching on my, perennial interest of, drawing a broader historical palette across Eurasia and the Mongols are a great way to do that.

Natalie von der Lehr 25:31
Is there anything that you would like to add about your research or about anything else that we have talked about?

Johan Elverskog 25:37
I could go on for hours and hours, but I'm sure no listener wants to listen to me drone on about it. I mean, if people are interested in the kind of my my view that Buddhism is an important component of Asian history and that we need to put it like centered in our historical narratives, I recommend that they go read a book of mine.

Natalie von der Lehr 25:55
You already mentioned SCAS and you are a fellow here during this academic year. And you've also been here once before. What are your thoughts on this environment, this multi- and interdisciplinary environment at the Collegium?

Johan Elverskog 26:08
I think it's absolutely phenomenal. I've had the glorious opportunity of being a fellow at several of these institutes for advanced studies. But SCAS is very close to my heart. And the interdisciplinary component of all of them, I think, is very, very useful. I mean again, sometimes, we fall in they call it our silos. We sit around and talk to China historians and, you know, and that's incredibly valuable. And I obviously learn a great deal from specialists in my field, but you never know. Talking to a philosopher who's talking about whatever they're working on and, like, makes me think about what I'm doing or talking to an anthropologist or sociologist. it's just an incredibly fruitful environment. I could probably do this at my home university, but as we all know, that invariably doesn't happen. Everybody's too busy running around, you know, chickens with their head cut off, doing their own work and review work and manuscripts and whatever they're doing, teaching. And so having this opportunity, to have these discussions at, at a place like SCAS is unbelievably rewarding.

Natalie von der Lehr 27:06
Thank you very much for joining me here in the studio, and our listeners, of course.

Johan Elverskog 27:09
Well, thank you very much for inviting me, it truly was a great talk.

Natalie von der Lehr 27:12
Thank you. And thank you for listening to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. In this episode, you've heard Johan Elverskog, Dedman Family Distinguished Professor and Professor of Religious Studies and, by courtesy, Professor of History at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. And fellow at SCAS during the academic year of 2025/2026 as well as 2007/2008.

We've talked about some of his research on the history of Buddhism and this was the first episode in our theme Religion and Religious Studies. SCAS Talks covers a wide range of topics, reflecting the collegium's multi- and interdisciplinary research community. There is something for everyone. If you enjoyed the episode, please recommend SCAS Talks to colleagues and friends, and subscribe so you don't miss future content. You can find us on Podbean, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and most podcast apps. Thanks again, Johan Elverskog, for joining us. And thank you for listening. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai