Dr. Ooi Eng Jin

Early Buddhist art, archaeology, manuscript culture, Pāli, Sanskrit

Dr. Ooi Eng Jin has been a lecturer and the Dean of the Faculty of Buddhist Studies at International Buddhist College (IBC) since January 2025. He also holds the Palyul-Khyentse Chair in Buddhist Textual Studies. Before joining IBC, Eng Jin was a faculty member of the College of Religious Studies at Mahidol University in Thailand.

Earlier, he was also a postdoctoral research fellow at Chulalongkorn University. Initially trained as a pharmacist in Malaysia, Eng Jin obtained his doctorate in Buddhist Textual Studies from Mahidol University in 2021. His thesis, "The Transmission of the Milindapañha with a Comparative Analysis of the Siamese Recensions," under the supervision of Giuliano Giustarini, Peter Skilling, and Kengo Harimoto, won both the Khyentse Foundation Award for Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation in Buddhist Studies (2022) and the Dean's List Award in the same year.

His research interests are textual criticism and philology of Pāli and Sanskrit texts, manuscript culture, early Buddhist art, and archaeology in South and Southeast Asia.

Contact: 
ej_ooi@yahoo.com

Publications

Articles: 

Among his recent publications are:
• "Clay Sealings from Perlis, Malaysia, and the wider world of the Bodhigarbhālaṅkāralakṣa-dhāraṇī," (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, September 2024);

• "Defining a Meṇḍaka Question in the Questions of Milinda," (Journal of Indian Philosophy, July 2023);

• "Transmission of the Milindapañha" (Buddhist Studies Review, September 2022);

• "Aspiring to be a Buddha and Life before Liberation: The Colophons of the Siamese Questions of King Milinda" (Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, June 2022);

• "Survey of the Pāli Milindapañha Manuscripts kept at the National Library of Thailand: A Brief Catalogue" (Journal of the Siam Society, May 2021).