Buddhist Thought: The Foundations
Prof. Eric Greene, Prof. Sonam Kachru, et al.
This class introduces the fundamentals of Buddhist thought, focusing on the foundational doctrinal, philosophical, and ethical ideas that have animated the Buddhist tradition from its earliest days in India 2500 years ago down to the present, in places such as Tibet, China, and Japan. Though there will be occasional discussion of the social and practical contexts of the Buddhist religion, the primary focus of this course lies on how traditional Buddhist thinkers conceptualize the universe, think about the nature of human beings, and propose that people should live their lives. Our main objects of inquiry are therefore the foundational Buddhist ideas, and the classic texts in which those ideas are put forth and defended, that are broadly speaking shared by all traditions of Buddhism. In the later part of the course, we take up some of these issues in the context of specific, regional forms of Buddhism, and watch some films that provide glimpses of Buddhist religious life on the ground.
Christ and the Bodhisattva: Comparative Theology and Buddhist Wisdom
Prof. Mark Heim
This course provides a brief introduction to the general field of comparative theology, a basic orientation to Mahayana Buddhist teaching and practice (with a particular focus on the case of the bodhisattva through the lens of Shantideva’s classic The Way of the Bodhisattva), and an exploration of Christian comparative reflection on these sources. The class engages several prominent theologians working in the Buddhist-Christian theological conversation and explores the ways in which Christian thought and practice can be informed by comparative learning from Buddhist sources. Area II and Area V.
Prerequisite: one term of graduate-level study of theology or equivalent.
Dreams, Demons, and You
Prof. Sonam Kachru
This course invites students to think philosophically about the fragility of persons and varieties of conscious experience in a global way. Beginning with the Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses and the conviction that the waking experience of healthy (male) humans does not exhaust ways in which we have experiences as of a world, students will supplement Vasubandhu’s examples alternate regions of experience (like dreams and other cosmological realities) with examples drawn from work on philosophy of lucid dreaming, depression, madness, transformation (in feminist philosophy of narrative) and the lives of animals; the course invites students to create and explore a discipline (karmic anthropology), and to use it to respond to the variety of Amerindian perspectivalism as reconstructed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.
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