Merijn ter Haar is a PhD student in Religious Studies at Yale University, specializing in the interplay between Buddhism and Daoism in medieval China. He holds a master’s degree in Transcultural Studies from Heidelberg University and dual bachelor’s degrees in Chinese Studies and Japanese Studies from Leiden University. His academic journey includes exchange experiences at National Taiwan Normal University and Nagasaki University, and a summer at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama, enriching his expertise in East Asian languages and cultures.
His interdisciplinary approach integrates theories from transcultural studies to deconstruct essentializing notions of culture and religion and tease apart how traditions are (trans)formed, maintained, and contested. His proposed dissertation project centers on the Taixuan zhenyibenji jing 太玄真一本際經, a Daoist scripture composed around the turn of the 7th century. Placing the text in a longue durée history, the project explores intellectual and social transformations in medieval China through the interplay of ideas and institutional structures, and examines how people creatively drew from the cultural repertoire(s) available to them in the entangled development of Buddhist and Daoist traditions.