Rafal Felbur

Rafal Felbur is Akademischer Assistent to the Chair of Buddhist Studies at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He works on the intellectual, cultural, and social dynamics of the encounter between India and China in the first millennium CE. Trained as a philologist and historian, he specializes in the textual evidence for these processes: translations of Indic Buddhist scriptures into Chinese, commentaries, bibliographic works, polemical and exegetical tracts, and official documents. Long interested in the Chinese reception of Indian Madhyamaka ideas, he has published an English translation of Sengzhao’s Zhao lun within the Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai’s English Tripiṭaka Series. Before joining Heidelberg, as a post-doctoral researcher in the Open Philology project at Leiden University, Netherlands, he prepared a monograph on the Sūrata-paripṛcchā, a Mahāyāna sūtra hitherto neglected in modern scholarship, from Tibetan and Chinese sources.