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BUDDHIST STUDIES

School

Harvard Divinity School

HDS 3013

Binding the Raft: Buddhist Polity in Sangha and Practice

BTI Category

Semester

Buddhist Studies

SP25

Sangha, or the "Buddhist spiritual community," as one of the Three Jewels is seen to be a refuge for community support, dharma practice, and personal transformation through the teachings of the Buddha. This course explores sangha from a range of Buddhist traditions in the context of "polity," the way a lived spiritual community is organized and functions to meet the needs of its members. Themes central to the course will include: how monastic traditions are being adapted in the present-day modern West; the nature and organizational structure of various forms of American sanghas and their practices; leadership, power and governance; the concept of a "Buddhist identity" in community; issues of race, gender and diversity; and the nature of power and authority between ordained and lay leadership. We will also explore liturgical practices and together seek to build a resource for ritual and core texts that support and represent a diverse range of community praxis. We will also discuss shaping sustainable polity among developing Buddhist communities in terms of "skillful means" as attending to the specific needs and structure of a given organizational vision. The course will include group discussion, in-class presentations, guest speakers, and research and analysis of a dharma community or Buddhist-inspired organization.

Professor

Class Day & Time

Chris Berlin

W

3:00pm - 5:30pm

Grading Option

Letter, P/F, Audit

Credits

4

Online?

N

Professor Approval Req'd?

Y

Prerequisites?

N

Notes

This is a limited enrollment course and requires instructor permission. Interested students can email the instructor prior to the first class meeting on Thursday, Jan. 26, to assess their interest and be placed on a preliminary class list. In the event that the course is overenrolled, prospective students will be asked to write a paragraph during the first class meeting to indicate their degree program, school, year, and interest in taking the class. Selected students will then be invited to enroll in the course via email by the end of that first day. Please note that this is not an introduction to Buddhism course, and so a basic knowledge of Buddhist principles and practices is required for this course.

School

Harvard Divinity School

HDS 3512

Buddhism and Social Justice

BTI Category

Semester

Buddhist Studies

SP25

The Buddhist tradition is deeply rooted in the cultivation of mental discipline, moral purification, and philosophical analysis. However, its social and political dimensions are often overlooked or regarded as the inadvertent byproducts of the inward path. This course aims to shed light on the relationship between personal and social expressions of Buddhist thought and practice. Additionally, it seeks to explore the influential roles played by Buddhist thinkers and institutions in times of social injustices, religious oppressions, and focuses on way forward in the modern world. Uniquely, the Buddhist movement initiated by Dr Ambedkar offers a way forward from the complex oppressive problems created by Indian socio-cultural and political history and is one of the most dynamic and optimistic Buddhist social movements in the world today.This seminar will explore Buddhist responses to some of the major social justice challenges of our time. Justice issues explored include both caste-based oppression in India and anti-Black racism. The course seeks not merely to theorize the narratives of caste and racial oppression, but to uncover what that has to do with people�s lives and potential of leadership in contemporary Buddhism. We will discuss how we ourselves might contribute to understanding and addressing aspects of these challenges. This course will comprise lectures, discussions, films, art, meditations, and talks by Buddhists engaged in social justice work.No previous study of Buddhism is required.

Professor

Class Day & Time

Santoshkumar Raut

R

3:00pm - 4:59pm

Grading Option

Letter, P/F, Audit

Credits

4

Online?

N

Professor Approval Req'd?

N

Prerequisites?

N

Notes

N

School

Harvard Divinity School

HDS 3563

Tibetan Buddhisms

BTI Category

Semester

Buddhist Studies

SP25

This course will study the variety of Buddhisms in Tibet, along with their connection to indigenous religions on the plateau. We will take up this vast topic through four main lenses. One will be facilitated by reading autobiographies and biographies of individual lives, written by women and men from various social positions and historical contexts, as a way to study how ritual practices and philosophical doctrines impact human relations, especially teacher-student, and lay-monastic, in Tibetan Buddhist worlds. The autobiographers range from the current Dalai Lama to an impoverished hermitess of the 17th century, a cave-dwelling visionary, a powerful aristocrat, a philosopher/monk, and others. Secondly, we will have the fortune to have a visiting lecturer for 3 classes, Dr. Tashi Dekyi, originally from Khams, who studies indigenous values and ways that the land itself is an agent in moral person-building in Tibet. This perspective will impact the way we study all of our readings for the semester. Thirdly, the course as a whole will take an eco-feminist perspective on the range of Buddhisms in Tibet, including an introductory study of tantric Buddhism, in anticipation of another course, on Buddhist tantra, to be taught in fall 2025. And finally we will pay attention throughout to religio-medical understandings of the human body in Tibetan Buddhism, including yogic practices and death practices. No previous background in Buddhism is required; both advanced and introductory students will be accommodated.

Professor

Class Day & Time

Janet Gyatso

TR

10:30am - 11:45am

Grading Option

Letter, P/F

Credits

4

Online?

N

Professor Approval Req'd?

N

Prerequisites?

N

Notes

N

School

Harvard Divinity School

HDS 3235

Taking the World Seriously: A Madhyamaka Buddhist Perspective on Engagement

BTI Category

Semester

Buddhist Studies

SP25

The Madhyamaka, or Middle Way tradition teaches that the entire world is illusory and ultimately empty, only conventionally real. How then are we supposed to take the world seriously? How can we make sense of reality, of knowledge, and of the importance of ethics? This problem preoccupied 7th and 8th century M_dhyamikas in India and their commentators in medieval Tibet. Candrak_rti (c. 600-650) addresses the metaphysical and epistemological challenge in Introduction to the Middle Way (Madhyamak_vat_ra). __ntideva (8th c.) addresses the ethical challenge in How to Lead an Awakened Life (Bodhic_ry_vat_ra), a text that builds on Candrak_rti�s. Their answers inform much subsequent Madhyamaka Buddhist thought and are important for contemporary debates and practice as well. We will read these two texts with relevant canonical commentary and contemporary secondary literature to develop an understanding of how this tradition engages seriously with a world it takes to be ultimately empty.

Professor

Class Day & Time

Jay Garfield

T

12:00pm - 2:59pm

Grading Option

Letter

Credits

4

Online?

N

Professor Approval Req'd?

N

Prerequisites?

N

Notes

N

School

Harvard Divinity School

HDS 3555

The Buddhist Path to Eco-empathy: Why We Should NOT Colonize Mars

BTI Category

Semester

Buddhist Studies

SP25

The course will be based on a philosophical investigation of the similarities between the effects of Buddhist meditation and immersion in the wilderness on humans. It will be structured around the scheme of the seven factors of awakening (bojjhan_ga), often translated as mindfulness, investigation of the phenomena, energy, rapture, tranquility, concentration, and equanimity. The results of the studies on human organisms' immersion in nature have come up with a similar collection of words.
The course will propose that in order to survive as a species, we need a new human presence on planet Earth, which can be achieved by rethinking Buddhist philosophy and meditation in light of the challenges of the contemporary world. The students will be presented with recent neuro-research on the human-nature relationship and philosophical reflection about the state of our society. They will be reffered to the tradition of virtue ethics (Buddhist and Western) as something that can enrich the strategies of fighting fear, uncertainty, and anhedonia so widespread in contemporary developed societies, especially in younger generations. Students will be invited to meditate (including meditating outdoors) and to relate the experience to their personal lives.
As an impulse for discussion, students will be presented with a hypothesis that human flourishing and perhaps even human survival can only happen in attunement to nature. It can be perceived as a personal, intimate possibility of opening a new dimension in our life, omitted by our culture obsessed with hedonistic self-satisfaction. From this perspective, we can look at our dependence on the planet not as a limitation but as a road to genuine freedom. Escaping Earth and moving to another planet to consume its resources ceases to be an option. We are not consumers of the planet Earth. We are the planet itself.

Professor

Class Day & Time

Marcin Fabjanski

M

3:00pm - 4:59pm

Grading Option

Letter, P/F, Audit

Credits

4

Online?

N

Professor Approval Req'd?

N

Prerequisites?

N

Notes

N

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