Connecting the Art, Literature, and Religion of South and Central Asia: Studies in Honour of Monika Zin

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This volume is dedicated to Prof. Dr. Monika Zin, an outstanding art historian of international standing in the field of early Buddhist art of South and Central Asia. In her numerous publications, she examines art objects and their iconography in connection with literary sources, cultural, religious, and historical backgrounds, as well as the transregional networks of the early Buddhist world concealed behind them. She thus opens up many new exciting perspectives and scholarly questions. With this volume, the editors and numerous authors from many countries around the world, whose works have been inspired in many ways by the scholarly work of Monika Zin, honour the jubilarian with a rich collection of contributions on the art, literature, and religion of South and Central Asia.

Ines Konczak-Nagel is a research associate in the project "Buddhist Murals of Kucha on the Northern Silk Road" at the Sachsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig and graduated in Indian Art History at Freie Universität Berlin. She received her PhD from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich for a thesis on representations of the prophecy of Sakyamuni's Buddhahood in the wall paintings of modern Xinjiang, worked at the Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin, and taught South and Central Asian Art History at the Leipzig University. Konczak-Nagel has contributed to studies on the Buddhist art in Kucha and Turfan.

Satomi Hiyama, assistant professor, at the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research and Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University, and an external colleague of the research group "Buddhist Murals of Kucha on the Northern Silk Road" at the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, is an art-historian focusing on the wall paintings of Buddhist caves on the eastern Silk Road in the 5-6th centuries. She received her PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2014. Her dissertation focused on the wall paintings of Kizil Cave 207. She has published several iconographical studies on the wall paintings in Kucha and Dunhuang.

Astrid Klein is a PhD student at the Universität Leipzig and has a doctoral research position at the academy project "Buddhist Murals of Kucha on the Northern Silk Road" at the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. She holds a BA in Sinology (2013) and a MA in East Asian art history (2016) from the Freie Universität Berlin. Klein's research interests include the donor images of the wall paintings of Kucha, clothing history, early medieval textiles, and pattern techniques, as well as the exchange of visual and material culture via the Silk Road.

"Connecting" would be one of the most important keywords to describe your research work, dear Monika, the focus of which is on the Buddhist art history of South and Central Asia. Although these regions are separated by different political borders today, they were once closely connected when Buddhist networks covered a wide area of Eurasia. Buddhism spread from India along the so-called Silk Road, accompanied by philosophical and religious ideas, knowledge, and material culture. What is commonly considered "Indian" actually encompasses a rich diversity of cultures and is fed by cultural contacts with various civilizations, such as the Iranian and the Ro- man empires. This phenomenon was also evident when Buddhist culture reached the kingdoms of Central Asia, where it in turn absorbed new influences as well as local customs and traditions. The study of these multi-layered interconnections and the complexity of the Buddhist cultural milieu in South and Central Asia requires an in-depth knowledge of a wide range of fields.

You broke down existing boundaries of aca- demic disciplines to do so. Your work is not limited to art history and iconography alone, but connects them to the research of various neighbouring disciplines, including Buddhist philology, archaeology, literature, and theatre studies. This has resulted in a large number of unique and significant contributions to the study of South and Central Asian Buddhist culture. Your publications are impressive not only in terms of their number, but also by the wide diversity of the questions to which you devoted yourself and through which you have decisively enriched and further developed the discipline.