EALC

The Chinese novel Xiyouji (Journey to the West) was first printed in the middle Ming Dynasty, but tales of its hero Sun Wukong the Monkey King accompanying the Tang monk Xuanzang on a journey to acquire Buddhist scriptures from India are attested in a variety of forms from earlier centuries. Arising from folklore, it has spawned adaptations in many media. In this course we will read Anthony Yu’s abridged translation, seeking to contextualize it in the traditions of travel literature, animal fable, Buddhist transformation tales, and philosophical parable. All readings in English.

This course will explore contending strands of feminist thought and practice in modern Korea. Building on previous coursework on feminism and the postcolonial critique of Western feminism, we will consider how various Korean expressions of women’s equality developed in historically contiguous and critical relation to other global feminist ideals and movements (e.g., “The New Woman”, “revolutionary motherhood”, Women of Asia, #MeToo, radical militant feminism, transfeminism, etc…). We will engage a diverse range of historical, literary, and ethnographic sources that probe feminist, proto-feminist, and anti-feminist ideas throughout different periods from Japanese colonialism to the North-South division to the neoliberal South Korean present.

Are minor lives worth documenting? How do we have access to the lives of the multitude, the dispossessed, the outcasts and the enslaved—the lives that archival documents have little to tell us about? Is it ethical to recreate and recover the unheard lives of peoples historically perceived as illiterate, undesirable, “diseased” and unassimilable? What is the power of imagining and writing about existing otherwise? We will consider these questions throughout the course by turning to the under-explored history of Asian diasporas in Latin America and the Caribbean. We will contextualize examples of life writing (broadly-defined) spanning from late seventeenth-century to the twenty-first century, both by members of the Asian diasporas themselves and as they have been re-imagined by contemporary authors. Some examples of primary texts include the spiritual biography of a seventeenth-century Mughal princess-slave who became a mystic in colonial Mexico, queer imagination of a Chinese “coolie” in late nineteenth-century Jamaica, the memoirs of Japanese-Peruvians in the internment camp during WW2, semi-autobiographical poems and short stories by contemporary Asian-Latinx writers. With the help of supplementary critical readings on radical life writing, we will consider throughout the course how imaginative, anti-racist, feminist and queer narratives may expand our current knowledge of the lives of the marginalized and the racialized.

This class will survey the constructions of a variety of Others in Cold War Japanese media and literature, including questions of ethnicity, race, sexuality, gender, and species. We will cover primary sources, including literary texts, films, and music, and we we will also read recent secondary scholarship in both English and Japanese relevant to the topic.  A substantial portion of the course readings will be in Japanese.   

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).