2025 Fall Religious Studies

A lab-comparable component to the study of Buddhist meditation, this class takes a hands-on approach to the understanding and experimentation of traditional and/or contemporary methods of mental cultivation. The methods of meditation will primarily be based on the 16 steps of breathing exercise as outlined in the Ānāpānasati-sutta, a foundational early Buddhist text that has been a source of much inspiration and controversies. The class will perform detailed analysis of those canonical meditation techniques, as well as resourceful ways of applying them in different situations. Much class discussion will be dedicated to exploring how these techniques map onto what we know about the connections between psychological behaviors and the generation of stress—the key theme in the Buddha’s path of resolving suffering.

This graduate seminar discusses the historical development in East Asia after 19^th century that motivates the rise of a series of modern Buddhist discourses, collectively named Humanistic Buddhism (HB) or renjian fojiao 人間佛教 nowadays. It also explores major figures, and their discursive actions to generate different types of HB movements that responded to various socio-religious issues arising from the predicament of modernization process among the countries and regions in East Asia.