Tiantian is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with a minor in Religious Studies. Her research focuses on Mahāyāna Buddhism and Buddhist sūtra literature, with particular attention to the use of metaphor. More specifically, she examines the role of metaphor in Mahāyāna sūtras, tracing its historical development and exploring how abstract Buddhist concepts are transmitted across cultural contexts through metaphoricity in religious discourse, practice, and ritual.
Engaging with contemporary theories of metaphor and cognitive science, including Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Conceptual Blending Theory, and Embodied Metaphor Theory, her dissertation investigates ocean-related metaphors in the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, as well as their cultural variations and their relationship to geographical reality, embodied practice and ritual within and beyond Buddhist contexts.