Evgeniy Torchinov

Yevgeny Alekseevich Torchinov was a Russian scholar of religion. An outstanding sinologist of religion, Buddhologist, and historian of the philosophy and culture of China.

He was born on August 22, 1956, in Ordzhonikidze (Vladikavkaz). Almost immediately after his birth, his family moved to Saratov.

In 1973, he graduated from Secondary School No. 67 and entered the Department of Chinese Philology at the Faculty of Oriental Studies of St. Petersburg State University. Afterward, in 1978, he became a postgraduate student at the State Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism. From 1981 to 1984, he was a research fellow at the same museum. In 1984, he moved to the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (now the St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences), where he worked for 10 years.

In 1994, he defended his doctoral dissertation on the topic “Daoism: An Experience of Historical-Religious Description.” In 1998, he headed the Department of Philosophy of Religion and Religious Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy of St. Petersburg State University. Since 1999, he headed the Department of Oriental Studies and Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy of St. Petersburg State University.

During his trips to Taiwan, Yevgeny Alekseevich took refuge in Buddhism and from 1993 to 1998 headed the St. Petersburg Society “Fo Guang,” the branch of the International Buddhist Monastic Order “Light of Buddha.”

In 2002, he became a laureate of the St. Petersburg Philosophical Society prize “Second Navigation” in the category “Textbook in the Philosophical Sciences” for his work Introduction to Buddhology. A Course of Lectures.

In April-May 2003, Yevgeny Alekseevich was in France on a grant from the Maison des Études de l'Homme (Humanities Research Center), a country long considered the center of Western Daoology. Upon returning from Europe, at a meeting of the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies of the East held on June