Venerable Yuen Hang Memorial Trust Professorship in Buddhist Studies

Buddhism originated in the fertile Gangetic plains of eastern-central India about 2,500 years ago and is recognised as one of the world’s major and oldest religions. It was founded by Siddhārtha Gautama, a wandering ascetic, teacher and spiritual leader who became popularly known as the Buddha. Today, Buddhism is followed by up to 500 million people around the world and has become an increasingly popular academic subject.

The Centre of Buddhist Studies was inaugurated at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) in September 2002. It was the first of its kind academic institution to be set up in the region to foster the systematic examination and research into all traditions and aspects of Buddhism from various methodological and disciplinary perspectives. 

Professor Klaus-Dieter Mathes is a Buddhism researcher, linguist and the Venerable Yuen Hang Memorial Trust Professor in Buddhist Studies at the Centre of Buddhist Studies at HKU. Professor Mathes’ research deals with exclusivism, inclusivism and tolerance in Mahāyāna Buddhism. He also worked as a Tibetologist at the University of Hamburg and University of Vienna.

A key focus of Professor Mathes’ work is to further understand Tibetan religious texts by comparing them with the original Sanskrit, whenever available, and to investigate the doctrinal differences between Tibetan Buddhism schools against the background of Indian Buddhism. As part of this ongoing work, he has travelled to India and Tibet, where he uses his ability to read ancient Tibetan texts to search for and research rare texts.

His research interests also include Indian Mahāmudrā Studies, Buddha-nature and hermeneutics, the Maitreya works, Buddhist philosophy and Science. In the field of Indology, Professor Mathes is particularly interested in a comparative analysis of the hermeneutical models used by the Madhyamaka and Yogācāra schools of Buddhism.

On the teaching front, his objective is to provide a solid philological grounding to students in order to enable them to work independently with Indian and Tibetan Buddhist texts. In addition, he considers it valuable for them to master modern Tibetan so that they can work together with representatives of the living Tibetan traditions.

Professor Mathes was born in Mannheim, Germany and studied Mathematics and Physics at the University of Nuremberg-Erlangen. His interest in the languages and cultures of India and Tibet sparked during a trip to Asia. He obtained his PhD in Indology from Marburg University and completed his “habilitation” qualification in Indology and Tibetology at Hamburg University in 1990. He was taken on part-time as an assistant in the Department of Central Asian Studies at the University of Bonn where he was responsible for the department's library from January 1991 to September 1993.

His growing eagerness in Buddhism and the Tibetan language took him to Kathmandu where he worked as the local director of the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project from late 1993 to 2001. From 2001 to 2004, Professor Mathes taught Sanskrit and Tibetan and lectured on Buddhism at the University of Hamburg.

In 2005, he lectured at the University of Vienna at the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, and became Professor of Tibetology and Buddhist Studies at the university in 2010 and then head of the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies from 2014-2023. Professor Mathes joined the Centre of Buddhist studies at HKU in 2023.

Professor Mathes has presented numerous papers and attended key conferences on Buddhism. His major publications include a study of the Yogācāra text Dharmadharmatāvibhāga (published in 1996 in the Indica et Tibetica series), A Direct Path to the Buddha Within: Gö Lotsāwa's Mahāmudrā Interpretation of the Ratnagotravibhāga (2008), Maitrīpa: India's Yogi of Nondual Bliss (2021) and Saraha’s Spontaneous Songs (2024), co-authored with Péter Dániel Szántó.