User:Samvs

I'm Sam van Schaik, and I work for the International Dunhuang Project (IDP) at the British Library, as Research Manager. IDP is an international collaborative effort to conserve, catalogue and digitise manuscripts, printed texts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and various other archaeological sites of the eastern Silk Road (Chinese Central Asia), and to make the images and information freely available online to all via multilingual websites. A list of my publications can be found on the IDP Research Register.

I am currently involved in several research projects for IDP including one on the Tibetan Zen texts (British Academy), one the influence of Gupta-period India on Central Asia (Leverhulme Trust), and one of the archaeology of Central Asian Buddhist sites (AHRC). My PhD in Religious Studies was awarded in 2000 by the Department of Religions and Theology at the University of Manchester. The dissertation, on the Dzogchen works of the 18th-century writer Jigmé Lingpa, was published as Approaching the Great Perfection in 2003. I have a blog - earlytibet.com - which has regular posts on Tibetan manuscripts and history and religion, and a list of my publications, most of which can be downloaded as PDFs.