Käte Hamburger Kolleg

Research Coordinator Buddhist Road
Former KHK Visiting Research Fellow 04/2011-03/2012
Former Direktor, Seminar for Buddhist Studies, Copenhagen, Danmark

Henrik Hjort Sørensen has been the co-director of the Seminar for Buddhist Studies in Copenhagen together with Ian Astely (Japan) and Per K. Sørensen (Tibet) from 1987–1999 and has become its director in 2000.

His fields of interest cover East Asian Buddhism broadly defined with special emphasis on the relationship between religious practice and material culture including religious art. The Buddhist sculptural art of Sichuan has been at the forefront of his endeavors since the mid-1980s. In the past two decades the various forms of Esoteric Buddhism (mijiao, mikkyō and milgyŏ) have taken precedence over other form of East Asian Buddhism, although Chinese Chan and Korean Sŏn Buddhism continue to be fields of major interest.

He is currently working on a large-scale project on the early history of Esoteric Buddhism in China including issues relating to definition, textual history and iconography. Starting with his fellowship in Bochum in 2011 he is directing his efforts to in-depth research into the relationship between Buddhism and Daoism in medieval China, including their mutual adaptations and borrowings.