Reinventing the Wheel: Paintings of Rebirth in Medieval Buddhist Temples (2007) won the Prix Stanislas Julien, awarded by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Institut de France.
Teiser took his undergraduate degree from Oberlin College, then his Master's and Doctorate from Princeton University, where he studied with Alan Sponberg and Denis Twitchett.
[3] Teiser shows that the festival is rooted in traditional Chinese observances in the seventh month, with offerings from the harvest, and also in Buddhist practices from India, where there was not a connection with ancestors, but to a yearly retreat for confession and self-release.
"[4] The scholar B. J. Ter Haar praised Teiser's approach in because it "distinguishes itself from existing historical studies by an extremely open and broad-minded attitude towards the subject and the available sources."
[5] His second book, Reinventing the Wheel: Paintings of Rebirth in Medieval Buddhist Temples (2006) won the Prix Stanislas Julien, awarded by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Institut de France.
Teiser uses both literary and visual sources to follow history and interpretations of the Wheel of Rebirth, or Bhavacakra, an iconic circle divided into sections to represent the Buddhist cycle of transmigration.