Readings of the Lotus Sūtra (2009), co-edited with Jacqueline I. Stone, is designed to open up the most popular scripture of Mahayana Buddhism, the Lotus Sutra, to first-time readers. The book presents newly commissioned essays by the leading scholars in the field, discussing the Indian Buddhist background of the text, exploring its philosophy and mythology, and tracing its influence on the cultures of China, Korea, and Japan. The book is the first volume in a new series edited by Teiser, Columbia Readings of Buddhist Literature.

Teiser's Reinventing the Wheel: Paintings of Rebirth in Medieval Buddhist Temples (2006) was awarded the Stanislas Julien Prize by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Institut de France), given in recognition of scholarship on the Asian Humanities. The book is concerned with Buddhist understandings of the afterlife and their expression in art and ritual life. Teiser focuses on the image of the wheel, long used in Buddhist cultures to describe the circular nature of the process of rebirth. He argues that the depiction of the various forms of life in the wheel (as god, human, animal, hell-being, etc.) served important philosophical and didactic purposes in premodern Buddhism. Ranging widely across the Asian continent, including India, the Silk Road, China, Tibet, and Japan, the book combines textual analysis with the interpretation of paintings and the architecture of Buddhist temples. The prize is named after the second holder of the chair in Chinese studies at the Collège de France, Stanislas Julien (1797-1873). Teiser's research for the book began in Paris in 1996, when he was a visiting professor in History and Philology at the École pratique des Hautes Études.

Stephen F. Teiser's early work examines the interaction between Buddhism as a pan-Asian religion and Chinese forms of social life. The Ghost Festival in Medieval China (1988) focuses on an annual celebration involving laypeople and monks, analyzing both mythology and ritual. The book received the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) prize for the best first book in the History of Religions and was translated into Chinese in 1999. The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (1994) explores the development of memorial rituals and concepts of the afterlife as reflected in manuscripts and paintings, especially those preserved among the Dunhuang corpus in northwestern China. The book received the Joseph A. Levenson Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) for pre-modern China.

Teiser's current research concerns the everyday rituals performed for laypeople by Buddhist monks in traditional China. The project is based on the rich trove of unique liturgical manuscripts recovered from Dunhuang (Gansu province, northwest China) and other sites. In several articles he has already published preliminary results of his work on the language of the liturgies and their performative aspects. The projected book will analyze Buddhist merit-making rituals, the vision of the afterlife invoked in the rites, and the relationship between monastic and lay adherents in the medieval Chinese world.