Public talk for International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University (February 24, 2021) https://youtu.be/77oz4tb8r0Y How did Hindu devotees come to worship an Indian goddess in the ‘Chinese Way?’ What was allegedly Chinese about these rituals and how is this related to the goddess’s Buddhist origins? When did Hindus start to think of Ch…[Read more]

This paper is part of a larger research project that attempts to apply historical social network
analysis to the study of Chinese Buddhist history. The underlying research questions are
whether social network analysis (SNA) metrics can be gainfully applied to Buddhist history,
and whether network visualizations can enable us to better…[Read more]

Course Description
In this seminar we shall read and discuss a selection of recent important works on and around Buddhism and material culture (in English). In addition we shall survey trends in recent Buddhist Studies scholarship produced in other languages (Chinese, Japanese, French, German, etc.). Students will be required to write regular,…[Read more]

Syllabus for a level 2 course on Health, Healing and Religion: Comparative Views. To be taught online Fall 2020.
Please contact me if you want more details of the online content (there are 4 short videos per module, plus other resources)

Mount Putuo, the Chinese Potalaka, is located in the Zhoushan archipelago not far off the coast from Ningbo. The abode of Avalokiteğvara/Guanyin was not only a popular pilgrimage site, but also played a strategic role for the naval control of the archipelago, especially in the Ming and Qing dynasties. In late imperial China, a number of military…[Read more]

Below we develop a method to determine whether the use of grammatical particles in Chinese Buddhist scriptures is characteristic for the period of their translation. The corpus consists of three different Chinese translations of an early Indian Mahāyāna text from two different periods. We use the results of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to d…[Read more]

Hidden in the Buddhist biographical literature on eminent monks is a large amount of information about who knew whom. It is especially rich for the time between 300 and 1000 CE, when the four major collections of “Biographies of Eminent Monks” (gaoseng zhuan) allow us to date and locate the relationships of individuals to a degree unimaginable for…[Read more]

In this seminar we will examine representations of health and accounts of disease in a variety of Chinese religions. We will explore the various vectors of disease, including the so-called “winds” and various types of demonic infestation. We will identify modes of
healing that employ therapies such as mineral, animal, and vegetable drugs, exo…[Read more]

The author did in situ research for an MA in Asian Religions on Japan’s greatest saint, Kūkai, in his birthplace of Zentsūji, along the Pilgrimage of Shikoku that symbolically recapitulates his career, and at Kōya-san, the mountaintop monastery south of Kyōto that Kūkai founded in the early 9th Century. Kūkai was a key figure igniting the golde…[Read more]

Contemporary engaged Buddhist scholars typically claim either that Buddhism always endorsed social activism, or that its non-endorsement of such activism represented an unwitting lack of progress. This article examines several classical South Asian Buddhist texts that explicitly reject social and political activism. These texts argue for this…[Read more]

This is a formatted version (for e-book readers or printing) of a very long blog post about secular and radical Buddhism. It discusses Stephen Batchelor’s secular Buddhism, Seno’o Giro’s radical Buddhism (as well as its roots in Mahayana philosophy; Nichiren and the Lotus Sutra in particular), and several related topics.

This published Japanese-English guidebook to the island of Shikoku, emphasizing its culture and history, has been available by permission on the Web in French, Spanish, and Dutch at European Websites, as well as this English-Japanese version since 1997. Most of the chapters are bilingual, with English and Japanese alternating for those studying…[Read more]

Mindfulness of breathing or ānāpānasati has a prominent place among the meditation methods taught by the Buddha. This doesn’t come as a surprise, if we know this is exactly the method the Teacher used to attain his own enlightenment, but also to “generally dwell during rains residence”. Therefore, he qualified this type of mental training as a n…[Read more]

Udāna is the third book of the Khuddaka Nikāya, the last of the five nikāyas in the Sutta Pitaka. It consists of eight vaggas, with ten suttas in each, 80 suttas in total. Similarly to some other books of the Pāli Canon, in this collection each sutta is a combination of prose and verses called udānas, inspired utterances or uplifting utte…[Read more]

A cultural, historical, and practical guidebook to Kagawa Prefecture on the island of Shikoku across the narrow Seto Inland Sea from the main island of Japan. Formerly the province of Sanuki, a compact area with convenient train lines, it has great potential for tourism. An active region culturally for more than 2,000 years, it was the birthplace…[Read more]

Subtitled “Symbols of Self-Realization in the Kanfugen-gyo [the meditation practice of the Lotus Sutra trilogy],” this was a presentation at the conference on Jungian Perspectives on Creativity and the Unconscious at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio in 1979. Having researched dreams and legends surrounding the Buddha, the view of the author…[Read more]

Two papers on the Jungian psychology of Asian religions from M.A. coursework at the University of Hawaii in 1978. “Equations of Freedom with Enlightenment” analyzes Chinese Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen as to the meaning of liberation. Then “This World as a Symbolic Body of the Buddha” analyzes the Shingon Buddhist cosmology of Kukai and its Tantric…[Read more]

Hashikuradera, the inner sanctuary of Kompira-san on Shikoku island, defied the Meiji government and has kept Buddhism and Shinto on the same hallway to this day. This old map depicts the syncretic divinity Kompira Daigongen whirling through the air from Kompira-san or Elephant’s Head Mountain (upper left) to meet Kukai, just labeled the great…[Read more]

Book Review The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations, Jacqueline I. Stone co-edited with Bryan J. Cuevas

This book could be seen as a novel method of tracing the history of a scripture. Jacob P. Dalton does this by “tracing the vicissitudes of a single ritual system—that of the Gathering of Intentions Sutra (Dgongs pa ’dus pa’i mdo)—from its ninth-century origins to the present day” (xv). This tantra is referred to as the “root tantra” and i…[Read more]