EALC

The tantric or esoteric traditions exerted a profound if often covert influence on the development of East Asian Buddhism as a whole and on Japanese Buddhism in specific. In this course, we will trace their development through a close reading of selected sources in translation, focusing on the Ben kenmitsu nikyô ron attributed to Kūkai (774–835), the first systematizer of esoteric Buddhist thought in Japan. We will pay especially close attention to how the label of the “esoteric” or “tantric” is used to define specific religious identities. Students wishing to take this class should have a grounding in (East Asian) Buddhist thought. 

Forbes Magazine has styled the Tibetan Buddhist monk Mingyur Rinpoche, “the happiest man alive.” Like no other religion, Buddhism in the public imagination is associated with providing us with an accessible way towards leading a good and happy life. But what is the “good life” according to the Buddhist tradition, and what is “happiness” supposed to lead us towards? In this course, we will explore these questions through a close reading of Buddhist sources in translation. Through these readings the course will introduce the doctrinal and practical foundations of the Buddhist traditions and serve as a gateway to more specialized studies. Course Note: This course counts as a Gateway course for RLST majors/minors.

What is Zen? Impossibly, seemingly, everything to everybody. In this course, we will explore Zen’s protean transformations through a close reading of primary sources in translation. Rather than asking what Zen is, we will focus on how in these materials the Zen traditions are continually de/re-constructed as contingent religious identities from medieval Japan to the contemporary United States and Europe. The focus of the course will be the premodern Japanese Zen tradition, its background in Chinese Chan, and its reception in the West. The course will include field trips to Zen communities in the Chicago area. Students wishing to take this course are strongly encouraged to also take Prof. Ziporyn’s course on Chan during the fall quarter. 

This course is part of a two-sequence series, to be followed by a course on Japanese Zen Buddhism taught by Professor Stephan Licha in Winter 2025.  "Chan" is a partial Chinese transliteration of the Sanskrit word "Dhyana," meaning meditation practice; the same Chinese character is pronounced "Zen" in Japanese.  This course will consist of the close reading (in English translation) and discussion of both the Indian Buddhist scriptures and indigenous Chinese sources that form the core of the tradition spanning Chan and Zen, with a few secondary descriptions of Chan institutions and cultural influences.  Our focus will be on the development of ideas concerning the nature of sentience and the implications this has for understanding the existential predicament of sentient beings, touching on central themes of dependent co-arising, non-self, Emptiness, consciousness-only, Buddha-nature and original enlightenment, and the methods of realization (doctrinal, non-doctrinal, and indeed anti-doctrinal) proposed to redress this existential predicament at each stage of Chan history. This will be done both with an eye to the historical continuity of these sometimes seemingly contradictory forms thought and practice, and also to extract from them whatever transhistorical philosophical and spiritual valences we care to derive from the texts.

The term pilgrimage is usually associated with journeys to ancient religious sites such as the Vatican or Mecca. But why do superfans who travel to Disney World often describe this in terms of a pilgrimage? Why is it that when anime fans visit real-life sites from their favorite shows, this is frequently called a “journey to sacred sites” (seiichi junrei)? In this course we will discuss these and other questions about pilgrimage in its religious and secular forms. We will consider examples such as the Islamic Hajj, the Crusades, and a 750-mile Buddhist pilgrimage in Japan, alongside journeys to Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross, Elvis’s Graceland, and the sets of Hobbiton. After first exploring theories of travel, tourism, and pilgrimage through a global array of examples, the second half of the course consists of a deep dive into connections between anime tourism, religious travel in Japan, and the worldwide boom of Japanese pop culture. At the end of the course students will present a small research project on a pilgrimage/tourist destination of their own choosing. No prior coursework on religion required. 

This course will explore Henri Bergson's philosophy as set forth in Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution, and its reception in late Imperial and early Republican China (late 19th and early 20th centuries). Of special interest will be the role played by Bergsonian ideas in the Yogacara revival and the formation of New Confucianism during this period, with particular focus on figures like Zhang Taiyan, Xiong Shili and Liang Shumin. This will require us to deeply engage Bergson's idea of "duration" (durée) and its interpretation, particularly in relation to a reconsideration of the Yogacara Buddhist notion of ālaya-consciousness (storehouse consciousness) and the Confucian idea of ceaseless generation and regeneration (shengsheng bu xi) as derived from interpretive traditions centered on the Book of Changes (Yijing). 

This course aims to go through recent English-written monographs in the Korean Studies field each week and to learn how scholarship addresses South Korean politics and socioeconomic changes in terms of class, gender, modernization, and development politics. By reading and discussing significant scholarly works, this course will help students extend their understanding of modern South Korean society and its relationship to the family, the state, civil society, popular culture, class, and the economy in both local and global contexts.

“Everyday” is easily perceived as too trivial to discuss its importance or mundane to have no historical value. In contrast, postcolonial, postmodern, poststructural, and even posthuman seem to have attempted to deconstruct pre-existing systems, social structures, our relationships with other people, objects (either living or not living), environment, and cultures (from ideology to affects, you name it). Yet, what we easily call macro-level or meta-narratives feels too heavy to lift. We will try to learn how to fill the gap between abstract and concrete and try to understand history as something specific and commonplace: Everyday. Using modern Korea as a lens, this course will address topics related to everyday—from what we do everyday (housing, eating, and clothes) to how we do everyday (earning, spending, meeting, thinking, feeling, etc.) How does food reflect the history of any society’s culture? What historical situations have created so-called “the Apartment Republic” in South Korea? Why did the Korean public become crazy about dancing in the 1950s? How has SPAM become a popular holiday gift set?  Likewise, we can ask various questions about our notions of everydayness and discuss the multiple meanings of everydayness, the politics of everyday, and its relationships in modern Korean History.

The course introduces both women’s history and theories concerning production and reproduction in modern China, Japan, and Korea. By bringing both production and reproduction into the discussion, the course extends the definition of “work” from workplaces to households, from formal work settings to informalities. We will read and analyze women’s economic engagements in different contexts and localities (e.g. factories, households, political mobilizations, global trade, and sex work) together with scholarships from socio-economic historians, anthropologists, and feminist scholars.

Historians have provided a broad chronological framework and empirical studies, such as the birth of feminist movements in twentieth-century East Asia, the pattern of gendered and highly specialized economic development, and women’s work as handicraft makers, factory employers, and sex workers. Anthropologists have established such analytical categories as “skill,” “practical knowledge,” and “gynotechnics” that were largely overlooked when discussing women’s work. Recent Marxist feminist scholars have extended Marxist examination of value to female labor, and contributed to our understanding of social reproduction by theorizing capitalism and its supporting system. With different concepts and frameworks, students are encouraged to reassess the complex meanings of differences outside of contemporary Western feminist theories.

Whether it is the tonalities and idiosyncracies of individual speech and dialogue in the polyphonic novel, the depiction of urban sounds and noises in Eileen Chang’s prose about 1930’s Shanghai, the borrowing of folk songs in political lyrics during the Mao era, or Western pop and rock music in experimental fictions from the 1980s, sound culture in its various forms and transformations has long left its imprint on modern literary imaginations. Sound is inseparable from technologies and ideologies of listening; in this course, we will use literary texts as aural technologies to approach historical sonic cultures, and read them as archives of sonic experiences. Through reading modern Chinese literary works together with the history of Chinese sound cultures, we ask: how does literature from different historical periods capture transient sounds? What can literature tell us about how sound is experienced in different historical periods? What are the strengths and limits of language as a medium of articulating aural experiences? How is the difference between sound and noise, listening and other senses, drawn in different historical periods, and what role does literature play in it?