Graduate

Selected readings in pre-modern Chinese literature from the first millennium B.C.E. to the end of the imperial period. The course covers important works in topics ranging from philosophy, history and religion to poetry, fiction and drama. Specific content varies by instructor.

This quarter we will read classics of the "ancient prose" movement in the late Tang and early Song periods.

Anyang is one of the most important archaeological sites in China. The discoveries of inscribed oracle bones, the royal cemetery, clusters of palatial structures, and industrial-scale craft production precincts have all established that the site was indeed the last capital of the Shang dynasty recorded in traditional historiography. With almost continuous excavations since the late 1920s, work at Anyang has in many ways shaped and defined Chinese archaeology and the study of Early Bronze Age China.  This course intends to examine the history of research, important archaeological finds, and the role of Anyang studies in the field of Chinese archaeology. While the emphasis is on archaeological finds and the related research, this course will also attempt to define Anyang in the modern social and cultural contexts in terms of world heritage, national and local identity, and the looting and illegal trade of antiquities.

The course will survey the first three of the Chinese Classics, the Yi jing or Classic of Changes, Shu jing or Classic of Documents, and Shi jing or Classic of Poetry, in three different moments of their histories: when they were first created, when they were canonized as classics, and when they were treated as the timeless wisdom at the heart of China's traditions. All readings will be done in English, and will include both primary documents and some secondary readings.

This course will survey the history of China from the late Shang dynasty (c. 1200 B.C.) through the end of the Qin dynasty (207 B.C.). We will explore both traditional and recently unearthed sources, and will take a multi-disciplinary approach.

A survey of recent work in the study of premodern Chinese religion, with an emphasis on questions of method.

This course meets the HS or SCSR Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.

This seminar will explore problems of world literature and worlding in relation to early modern and modern Japanese literature. We will read recent theoretical and scholarly studies on the problem of world literature and read a variety of works of Japanese literature stretching from eighteenth century to the contemporary period in relation to this question. There will be two reading tracks in the course, one for students who are able to read in Japanese and one for students whose reading will be entirely in English.

This course will be an experiment in juxtaposition. The concept is no more and no less than trying to read in tandem a number of religious and philosophical writings from various corners of world culture which focus on some form of triplicity, triads, trinities, including the Three Hypostases of Neoplatonism, the Christian Trinity, the Hindu Trimurti, the Daoist triad of vitality/energy/spirit, the inter-nested triadic structures of Yang Xiong's Taixuanjing and those of the Hegelian system, the Tiantai Three Truths and its reconfiguration of the Buddhist trikaya, triple gem and other triads, and perhaps others. We will enter into this experiment without any preconceived thesis about what we will find when these things are looked at all together, working together to develop ad hoc hypotheses about how these triads function, why they are so prevalent, what each one can teach us about all the others and vice versa. It is a genuine experiment in that we do not know what will happen when these elements are combined, and we adopt an attitude of reverent expectation and a willingness to follow it wherever it may lead.

This course will focus on close readings of primary texts in Chinese concerning the polemics around the introduction of Christianity into China in the Ming Dynasty, starting with Matteo Ricci's introduction of Catholic doctrine in his 天主實義 and the polemical responses to it from mainly Confucian and Buddhist authors, with special attention to the metaphysical premises of the conflicting traditions, and more generally what might be at stake in them.

This experimental seminar examines how medical knowledge is constituted and disseminated in texts, images, and performances in early modern Japan and China (roughly 1600-1850). This period saw an explosion in the number of doctors, print and visual materials, and a new centrality of medical, pharmacological, and bodily knowledge and practices. Looking beyond established national, cultural, and political boundaries, we will study how shared medical traditions converge and diverge over time and space. How did literary genre shape and constrain the forms medical knowledge took and vice-versa? Who has access to and who has control over technologies of health and sickness, including learned medicine, vernacular healing, and self-care?  How was efficacy understood, contested, and proven in a medical and legal context?

Primary sources to be read include medical and crime cases, forensic reports, plays, novels, biographies, imperial encyclopedias, almanacs for daily life, illustrated pharmacopeia, religious tracts, printed advertisements, and shops signs. Film and tv episodes will be screened to explore contemporary narratives of early modern medical knowledge in the very different political and media economies of post-war China and Japan.

Throughout the centuries, Buddhism has developed a unique and immensely diverse visual culture. Indeed, attention to the visual may well be one of the fundamental characteristics of this religious tradition, to the point that Buddhism in China was known as the “teachings of images” (xiang jiao). This course explores the rich world of Buddhist visual culture through a focus on some of its most representative aspects. We begin with a discussion of the Buddha’s absence and the need for representations in the Indian context. Next, we study forms of meditation and visualization in China and Japan, together with dream-making technologies and dreamscapes. Then, we move into the complex world of Buddhist material artifacts in East Asia (images, mandalas, temple architecture, and Buddhist fashioning of landscape). Toward the end of the course, we examine material that is rarely studied in terms of Buddhist visual culture, namely, maps and visions of the world (Indian, Chinese, and Japanese models), and the cultural components of display of Buddhist objects at temples and museums. The course concludes with theoretical considerations on the dichotomies of absence/presence and visible/invisible that seem to characterize much of Buddhist visual culture. Through an analysis and discussion of a wide set of readings, ranging from Buddhist meditation texts to studies of visualizations, dreams, icons, and the landscape, from practices of display to acts of iconoclastic destruction, this course aims at offering a wider conceptualization of visuality in Buddhism, not confined to consideration of art.