京都大学 白眉センター

Among the bodies of auxiliary knowledge the Buddhist and Christian missionaries brought to various parts of Eurasia which had a lasting impact to the local cultures was the astral science. Often disguised in various forms in the religious and pseudo-religious texts, the knowledge of the heaven comprises a broad range of interrelated subjects such as cosmology, astronomy, metrology, calendrics, astrology and astral worship. At a time when the concept of science was indistinct from its non-scientific counterparts, the religious institutions had for a long time served as the centers where such knowledge was preserved and developed. In this seminar, I will take a broad look at the pattern of transmission and transformation of this form of protoscience during the first millennium, highlighting some specific topics such as the concept of planetary weekdays and the horoscope to demonstrate how foreign ideas underwent a continual process of appropriation as they crossed various cultural and linguistic boundaries.