On Benjamin Brose, and the journey that mattered more than the pilgrim.

Benjamin Brose is Professor of Buddhist and Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he chairs the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. His scholarship works across the cultural history of religion in China, and, at its centre for more than a decade, the afterlife of the seventh-century pilgrim Xuanzang.

His book Embodying Xuanzang: The Postmortem Travels of a Buddhist Pilgrim (University of Hawaii Press) follows what happened to Xuanzang after his death, how his relics travelled, how his story was rewritten, how his image was carried into places he had never been. The Dan David Prize honored Brose for scholarship that spans the early history of Buddhism in China and the transmission of ancient religious narratives into contemporary religious practice, for the power of stories to change people's understandings, experiences, and lives.

Brose's work is not about Xuanzang the man. It is about what happened after Xuanzang died. The pilgrim's journey from Chang'an to India in the seventh century became a story later generations rewrote, over and over, until the man himself was almost invisible under his own symbol. Brose is interested in that afterlife: how one historical figure becomes a religious tradition, and how the tradition keeps changing the figure. Different people, across thirteen hundred years, have seen Xuanzang differently.

The film's task was to give the viewer the feeling of the journey itself, not the pilgrim who made it. So we show Xuanzang mostly in long shot, with only a few hints of his face, because Xuanzang, now, belongs to everyone who has ever needed him. The film moves through the landscape a Chinese Buddhist scholar would have crossed to reach India, the deserts, the mountains, the pagodas glimpsed in mist, the small ritual objects a monk would have carried, the mindful gestures of the practice itself. Buddhism as encounter, not as biography. What it might have felt like to walk that far, and why the walking mattered.

We worked in watercolour, in a language close to Chinese painting without imitating it. The illustration follows the journey more than the pilgrim’s face: no one knows what Xuanzang looked like.

Each year the Foundation chooses, with the laureate, the subject of the film they are honoured for, and we turn it into script, image and motion. The laureate sees it for the first time on the evening of the prize — on the big screen, in a room full of people who have come to honour them. Afterwards the films go out on social media, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and on the Foundation’s own site, beside the committee’s reasoning and the laureate’s interview, and some laureates carry them into their own classrooms, to show what it is they work on.