Dr. Carsten Krause

Carsten Krause has specialized in the past and present of Chinese Buddhism since the early 1990s, maintaining an ongoing affiliation with the University of Hamburg. From 1991 to 2001, he studied in Passau, Nanjing, Hamburg, Chia-yi, and then Hamburg again, with the support of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (“Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes”). While at the Department of Chinese Studies at the University of Hamburg (Asien-Afrika-Institut) (漢堡大學亞非學院中文系), he participated in a two-year interdisciplinary working group on the “Ta-sheng ch’i-hsin lun” (大乘起信論) under the guidance of Professor Michael Friedrich and graduated with a master’s degree in 1997. His thesis focused on a work by Chi-tsang (吉藏).

From 1997 to 1998, Carsten Krause spent half a year at the Center for Religious Culture and Buddhist Studies (now the Institute of Religious Studies) of Nanhua University (南華大學) in Chia-yi, supported by a scholarship. He continued studying Chinese Buddhism at the University of Hamburg and completed his PhD with a dissertation entitled “Ch’eng-shih lun (成實論) – On the Reception and Influence of a Buddhist Text in Medieval China from Kumarajiva (344–413) to Chi-tsang (549–623)”. The dissertation was supervised by Professor Michael Friedrich and Professor Lambert Schmithausen and was graded “summa cum laude”.

During his subsequent work at the Senate Chancellery of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, where he was in charge of Chinese-German relations (2002–2006), Carsten Krause wrote an article entitled “Interdependencies between State and Buddhism in the People’s Republic of China” in 2005/06 which was published in one book and two journals.

During his later activities as Executive Director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Hamburg (2007-2021) and as Coordinator of the China Center at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel (2021-2022), Carsten Krause further expanded his research on Buddhism in contemporary China. Since 2017 he has been affiliated as Research Fellow to the Numata Center for Buddhist Studies at Universität Hamburg. Here Carsten Krause initiated a symposium on "Challenges for the Revival and Future Development of Chan-Buddhist Monasteries in China" in 2015 and the lecture series "Comparative Studies on Buddhism in Taiwan and Mainland China" in 2019. In 2020 he was the organizer of the international workshop entitled “When a New Generation Comes up: Buddhist Leadership and Lay People in Contemporary China”. Among other publications, he edited a supplement to the Journal of the Oxford Center for Buddhist Studies on this workshop topic.

Since 2022, Carsten Krause has been working on the DFG-funded project "Buddhist Positioning in the People's Republic of China (1978-2023)". Further, he is also offering lectures for students of the Department of Chinese Language and Culture and the Numata Center for Buddhist Studies of the University of Hamburg on the topic of Buddhism in contemporary China.