Advisory Council

Dr. Daniel Veidlinger

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Dr. Veidlinger's training is in the texts, languages and practices of South and Southeast Asian religions, in particular Buddhism and Hinduism. He studies and teaches these religions from historical, sociological, and philosophical perspectives, with the aim of providing a rich understanding of these traditions that is ever more important in today's world.

 

Dr. Veidlinger's research has focused on the roles that different communications media played in the formulation and transmission of religious texts and ideas in Asia. Currently, he is extending this study to encompass the role of modern mass media such as radio and the Internet in propagating Buddhist ideas around the world. He is particularly interested in examining the parallels between the rapid spread of Buddhism along the main communication route of the ancient world, the Silk Road, and the modern information highway, the World Wide Web.

 

Dr. Veidlinger is also involved in bringing Digital Humanities techniques to the study of Buddhism, and he has studied the statistical programming language R in order to analyze word usage patterns in novel ways as found in Buddhist and other sacred texts. Some of his research extended to more general language use has gone into a word exploration tool aimed at helping writers and other creative people. 

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Dr. Veidlinger has several books including: Digital Humanities and Buddhism: An Introduction (De Gruyter, 2019); From Indra's Net to Internet: Communication, Technology, and the Evolution of Buddhist Ideas (University of Hawaii Press, 2018); Buddhism, the Internet, and Digital Media: The Pixel in the Lotus (Routledge, 2014); and 

Spreading the Dhamma: Writing, Orality, and Textual Transmission in Buddhist Northern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2006).