This dissertation examines the idea of ethical revaluation — taking things we normally see as good for our flourishing and seeing them as neutral or bad, and vice versa — in the Mahāyāna Buddhist thinker Śāntideva. It shows how Śāntideva’s thought on the matter is more coherent than it might otherwise appear, first by examining the consistency…[Read more]

Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory insists that valid knowledge must be derived from paradigms: sets of injunctions and social practices that lead to replicable experiences. Wilber claims that the theory still includes the essentials of premodern traditions, because the essentials of those traditions consist of a phenomenological core of practices l…[Read more]

Syllabus for a graduate seminar on Chinese Religions at McMaster University Term II 2017-2018

This dissertation considers how Tantrism, a ritual tradition vanished in India and in China, but preserved in modern Japan and Tibet, became a component of the revival of Chinese Buddhism between the two World Wars. Tantrism became appealing to revivalists who, in China’s time of internal war and foreign invasion, sought to recover this lost t…[Read more]

In this dissertation I argue that print culture acted as a catalyst for change among Buddhists in modern China. Through examining major publication institutions, publishing projects, and their managers and contributors from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s, I show that the expansion of the scope and variety of printed works, as well as new…[Read more]

Graduate seminar in Buddhist Studies at McMaster University

Tibet – end of the legend

Philosophy has long become a key term in the study of Buddhism, defining the moral and rational essence of the Buddha’s teaching, emblematic of its Indian origins. In this essay, I suggest that the relation of Buddhism and philosophy, which prior to the mid-nineteenth century was framed as the relation of the Religion of Fo to the cult of v…[Read more]

article about Mount Zhongnan in the Tang dynasty