Religion-Buddhism

Classical Tibetan language has been an essential language of Buddhist teachings for 1500 years and is still an active part of Buddhist and Tibetan life across Asia--a Latin of the Buddhist world. This course is an introduction to Classical Tibetan, a gateway to the vast worlds of Tibetan and Indian Buddhism. In the first year the focus is on the writing system, the vocabulary, and the grammar of Classical Tibetan. No prior experience is necessary.

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Buddhism.

Classical Tibetan language has been an essential language of Buddhist teachings for 1500 years and is still an active part of Buddhist and Tibetan life across Asia--a Latin of the Buddhist world. This course is an introduction to Classical Tibetan, a gateway to the vast worlds of Tibetan and Indian Buddhism. In the second year you will use this knowledge to read Buddhist texts in Classical Tibetan.  No prior experience is necessary.

Provides a systematic introduction to Tibetan Buddhism with a strong emphasis on tantric traditions of Buddhism - philosophy, contemplation, ritual, monastic life, pilgrimage, deities & demons, ethics, society, history, and art. The course aims to understand how these various aspects of Tibetan religious life mutually shape each other to form the unique religious traditions that have pertained on the Tibetan plateau for over a thousand years.

An introduction to environmental ideas, texts and practices of Buddhism in broad historical and geographical context. Engages Buddhist "environmental imagination" through readings of primary texts, considers the ways that contemporary Buddhists around the world have interpreted environmental problems, and the ways that Buddhist modernist movements draw upon Buddhist ideologies in the service of social-environmental change.

Theravada, Mahayana, and Tantrayana Buddhist developments in India.

This course examines the ways in which Chinese Buddhism differs from the Buddhisms of other countries. The first half of the course introduces Buddhism with a focus on the historical development of the tradition.The second half of the course surveys several philosophical schools and forms of practice including Huayan, Chan, Pure Land, and Tantric Buddhism.

This course focuses on meditation from three overlapping perspectives: traditional Buddhist practices, contemporary scientific research, and modern secular adaptations; students also learn secular meditative practices firsthand. Each day we will explore a major type of meditation that relates to a variety of topics and practices - attention, insight, compassion, aesthetics, somatic work, visualization, open awareness, and so forth.

This is a lecture-based course--an idiosyncratic but hopefully helpful introduction to Buddhist philosophy. A few aspects of Buddhist philosophy, at any rate. The subject is potentially endless and can be grabbed from several different ends. Note: this course emphasizes the history of Buddhist concepts and arguments in premodern South Asia. But we will explore what are hopefully ideas of interest: in philosophy of mind; metaphysics; gender.

This course is an introduction to Buddhism and an exploration of the place of Buddhism within contemporary Asian, European, and North American cultures through film. The goals are 1) to identify longstanding Buddhist narrative themes in contemporary films, 2) to consider how Buddhism is employed in films to address contemporary issues, and 3) to gain through film a vivid sense of Buddhism as a complex social and cultural phenomenon.

This course explores the close and dynamic relationship between religion and environmental thinking in East Asia.

Studies the development and history of the thought, practice, and goals of Zen Buddhism.

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Buddhism.

This course serves as an introduction to the religious beliefs and practices of China, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora. The course covers several broad themes in Chinese religion, including ritual, self-cultivation, means of communicating with the gods, and the intersection of political authority and religion. We will engage with textual, material, and visual traditions.

The goal of this course will be to examine different conceptions of Buddhist meditation and how these different conceptions affect the nature of practice and the understanding of the ideal life within a variety of Buddhist traditions. Thus, the study of Buddhist meditation traditions reveals not just intricate forms of practice, but reveals the nature of the good life and how one lives it.

Buddhist Mysticism and Modernity

Classical Tibetan language has been an essential language of Buddhist teachings for 1500 years and is still an active part of Buddhist and Tibetan life across Asia--a Latin of the Buddhist world. This course is an introduction to Classical Tibetan, a gateway to the vast worlds of Tibetan and Indian Buddhism. In the second year you will use this knowledge to read Buddhist texts in Classical Tibetan.  No prior experience is necessary.

This seminar takes as its point of departure Carolyn Bynum's statements: "No scholar studying religion, no participant in ritual, is ever neuter. Religious experience is the experience of men and women, and in no known society is this experience the same." The unifying theme is gender and Buddhism, exploring historical, textual and social questions relevant to the status of women and men in the Buddhist world from its origins to the present day.

Common to all the world¿s philosophies is engagement with the claim that all that exists in the universe is ultimately one, whether in one¿s awareness or in actual fact. This course examines how Hindus and Buddhists have articulated this idea, basing the same in detailed analysis of one¿s subjective awareness of reality, in an examination of the nature of existence independent of one¿s experience of it, and on the basis of scriptural revelation.

This course explores the origins and development of Buddhism in South Asia. It assumes students have no prior knowledge of Buddhism. The goal is to understand the complex of teachings, practices, and relationships that would become known later as Buddhism and, simultaneously, how such a complex has developed within specific cultural contexts.

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Buddhism.

This course is a seminar that examines the development of Buddhism in America going from its earliest appearance to contemporary developments.

This topical course provides upper level undergraduate students in Religious Studies an opportunity for advanced coursework in Buddhism

This course will explore how scholars have understood the concept of Orientalism to describe processes in which Westerners have distorted (and even constructed wholesale) understandings of what Buddhism can be to serve their own interests. We will begin with Edward Said's foundational work, Orientalism, then consider how his ideas have been used to develop critiques of Western understandings of Buddhism up to the present day.

A history of Tibetan Buddhist literature from the origins in the 7th century to the early 20th century, focused on literature produced in Tibet, covering major genres and styles from all the major schools, traditions, eras and regions. Weekly readings of excerpts and short pieces. Course is entirely in English translation. Knowledge of Tibetan language encouraged but not required. Seminar format, active discussion required.