Rafal K. Stepien, a philosopher and scholar of religion based at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, where he is a European Research Council Principal Investigator leading a team of researchers studying Chinese Buddhist philosophy (ChinBuddhPhil). He is concurrently Editor-in-Chief at the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy. Rafal holds degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia, and the University of Western Australia, and he has completed further studies at Harvard, Bologna, Damascus, Tehran, Esfehan, Peking, and Fo Guang Universities, among others. He was the inaugural Cihui Foundation Faculty Fellow in Chinese Buddhism at Columbia, the inaugural Berggruen Research Fellow in Indian Philosophy at Oxford, a Humboldt Research Fellow in Buddhist Studies at Heidelberg, and the Soudavar Memorial Research Scholar in Persian Studies at Cambridge. Rafal’s research is inter-disciplinary, cross-regional, and poly-glottic, ranging among Buddhist and Islamic philosophical, religious, and literary texts composed in Sanskrit, Chinese, Arabic, and Persian. His publications include Buddhism Between Religion and Philosophy: Nāgārjuna and the Ethics of Emptiness (Oxford, 2024) and Buddhist Literature as Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy as Literature (SUNY, 2020).