People
Alumni Profiles
GIULIO AGOSTINI
Giulio Agostini took his first degree (Laurea) in Classics in Milan, where he also started studying Sanskrit and Pali. He came to Berkeley to specialize in Indian Buddhism; in addition to his work on Sanskrit and Pali materials he acquired facility in Classical Chinese and Tibetan. He completed his dissertation, entitled "Precepts and Upasaka Status: Indian Views of the Buddhist Laity," in May, 2002. He now continues to pursue his research and publishing in the areas Vinaya and Hinayana literature in general, and lay Buddhism in ancient India in particular, while teaching Latin and Italian in a secondary school in Milan.
JUHN AHN
Juhn Ahn received both his B.A. (Asian Studies and Studies in Religion) and M.A. (Buddhist Studies) from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor under the supervision of Prof. Robert Sharf. He has just completed his dissetation on the topic of "Zen illness" with a special emphasis on the works of Dahui Zonggao (1089-1163), Chin'gak Hyesim (1178-1234), Wuyi Yuanlai (1575-1639), and Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769). Juhn Ahn does research in Japanese, Chinese and Korean Buddhist literature. He holds a joint appointment with the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto.
PRAPOD ASSAVIRALHAKARN
CARL BIELEFELDT (Stanford University)
Professor Carl Bielefeldt, specializes in East Asian Buddhism, with particular emphasis on the intellectual history of the Zen traditon. He is the author of Dôgen's Manuals of Zen Meditation and other works on early Japanese Zen, and serves as editor of the Soto Zen Text Project. Co-director of the Stanford Center for Buddhist Studies and the Asian Religion and Cultures Initiative.
MARK BLUM
Mark Blum is Associate Professor in the Dept. of East Asian Studies, State University of New York, Albany. He is author of The Origins and Development of Pure Land Buddhism, and co-editor of the forthcoming I. He is senior editor for the Japan section of the E.J. Brill series, Handbook of Oriental Studies, a commissioned research fellow at Otani University, Bukkyo University, and the Jodoshu Research Institute at Zojoji where he is translating the complete works of Honen. He is also translating the 40-fascicle Chinese text of the Mahayana version of the Mahaparinirvana sutra. His research is primarily focused on Japan, and includes the topics of historical consciousness, death and funerary culture, Pure Land Buddhist thought and culture (particularly visual culture), and Buddhist ethics in modern Japan.
ROBERT BUSWELL (UCLA)
Robert Buswell earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. Before returning to academe, he spent seven years as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, Hong Kong, and Korea, which served as the basis of his book The Zen Monastic Experience: Buddhist Practice in Contemporary Korea (Princeton University Press, 1992). He is now a professor of Chinese and Korean Buddhist studies, and chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, at the University of California, Los Angeles. He founded UCLA's Center for Buddhist Studies in 2000, and was the initial faculty director of the Center for Korean Studies from 1992 to 2001.
Buswell specializes in the Son (Zen) tradition of Korean Buddhism. In addition to The Zen Monastic Experience he is author of The Korean Approach to Zen: The Collected Works of Chinul (University of Hawaii Press, 1983), reprinted as Tracing Back the Radiance: Chinul's Korean Way of Zen (University of Hawaii Press, 1991); and The Formation of Ch'an Ideology in China and Korea: The Vajrasamadhi-Sutra, A Buddhist Apocryphon (Princeton University Press, 1989). He is also editor of Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha (University of Hawaii Press, 1990); Paths to Liberation: The Marga and Its Transformations in Buddhist Thought, Robert Buswell and Robert M. Gimello, coeditors (University of Hawaii Press, 1992); and Abhidharma Buddhism to 150 A.D. Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, vol. 7, Karl H. Potter, editor; Robert Buswell, P. S. Jaini and Noble Ross Reat, coeditors (Delhi: Motilal Barnarsidass, 1996). Buswell has also authored some forty articles concerning the Korean, Chinese, and Indian Buddhist traditions.
EUN SU CHO
SUNG TAEK CHO
RONALD DAVIDSON
Ronald Davidson earned his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies in 1985, specializing in Indian Yogacara philosophical problems. He is Professor of Religious Studies.
His primary area of research is in the domain of tantric Buddhism (Vajrayana, Mantrayana, Mantranaya), especially in medieval India and early Tibet. His books include Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), Tibetan Renaissance: Tantric Buddhism in the Rebirth of Tibetan Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Ronald M. Davidson and Christian K. Wedemeyer, eds. Tibetan Buddhist Literature and Praxis: Studies in its Formative Period, 900-1400 (Leiden: Brill Academic, 2005); Steven D. Goodman and Ronald M. Davidson, eds. Tibetan Buddhism: Reason and Revelation (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992); and Ronald M. Davidson, ed. Wind Horse: Proceedings of the North American Tibetological Society (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1981).
His current research is on the issue of secrecy in Indian tantric Buddhism, which will be examined in Secrecy and Revelation in Indian Esoteric Buddhism, to be completed shortly. Concurrently, he is also compiling on a Sanskrit edition and annotated English translation of Padmavajra's Guhyasiddhi (The Secret Accomplishment), a ninth century work proposing an extreme version of esoteric praxis, one that calls into question the apologetic ideology that such behaviors were symbolically coded rather than physically enacted. Beyond these, he has a monograph on the siddha Virupa in preparation.
JANET GYATSO (Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies, Harvard University)
Janet Gyatso is a specialist in Buddhist studies with concentration on Tibetan and South Asian religious culture. She studied primarily with Professors Jaini and Lancaster during her years at Berkeley, where she received her Ph.D. In 1981. She is currently Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies at Harvard University, in the Divinity School. She taught at Amherst College, the University of Michigan, and Wesleyan University before going to the Divinity School, Harvard University. Her books include Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary; In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism; and Women of Tibet. Her current book project is on traditional medical science in Tibet, its relation to modernity, and its relation to Buddhism. She has also been writing on conceptions of sex and gender in Buddhist monasticism and in Tibetan medicine. Previous topics of her scholarship have included visionary revelation in Buddhism; issues concerning lineage, memory, and authorship; philosophical questions on the status of experience; and autobiographical writing in Tibet.
ROBERT KRITZER (Kyoto Notre Dame University)
Robert Kritzer is Professor at Kyoto Notre Dame University. He specializes in abhidharma and early Yogācāra, and is the author of two books, Rebirth and Causation in the Yogācāra Abhidharma (Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde 44. Wien: Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien, Universität Wien, 1999) and Vasubandhu and the Yogācārabhūmi: Yogācāra Elements in the Abhidharmako śabhāṣya (Studia Philologica Buddhica Monograph Series 12. Tokyo: The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 2005). He has written on the intermediate existence (antarābhava) and accounts of childbirth in Indian Buddhism, as well as on the meaning of the term Sautrāntika. Other interests include the relation between Buddhism and the Indian medical tradition and the traditional study of the Abhidharmakośa in Japan. He has been invited to McGill University for the winter term of 2006 as a Numata visiting professor.
CHANGHWAN PARK
Changhwan Park received his B.A in Philosophy and M.A
in Oriental Philosophy from Seoul National University. He is interested in
the historical formulations
of doctrinal concepts and their philosophical implications in Indian Buddhism.
He has just completed his dissertation entitled "Two Traditions of Causality in the Abhidharma Literature: with special reference
to the debates between the Sautrantika and the Vaibhasika schools on Causation
models."
SUNG BAE PARK
WILLIAM POWELL (UC-Santa Barbara)
William Powell is Associate Professor of Chinese Religions and Buddhist Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, and the Department of Religious Studies, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was trained in the philological methods of Buddhist studies, which was the basis for his translation and study of the prominent 9th century Chan (Zen) monk, Dongshan. This is to be followed by a study of Dongshan's disciple, Caoshan. His present work focuses on the relationship between Chinese Buddhism, pilgrimage and sacred space, particularly mountains.
JENLANG SHIH
KENNETH TANAKA
KYOKO TOKUNO
BRUCE WILLIAMS
TERI YAMADA (CSU-Long Beach)
Professor Shaffer Yamada (b. 1949) studied both classical Chinese and Sanskrit languages as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she received a bachelor's degree in Asian Studies before moving on to the University of California, Berkeley. There she continued her studies in classical Asian languages, adding Tibetan and modern Japanese, in order to pursue a comparative philological analysis of classical texts. From 1979-1986, she lived in Tokyo, Japan, where she studied in the departments of Indian and Buddhist Philosophy (University of Tokyo) and Buddhist Studies (Komazawa University), while working as a consultant for "The Japan Times" book division and NHK, Japan's public television network. In 1985, she received a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1986 returned to her hometown, Los Angeles, with her son, Yuzo (b. 1984).
During the mid-1990s, she also began to study Khmer language and literature, and to archive the cultural history of the Cambodian community in Long Beach. She has recently edited the first anthology of Southeast Asian short fiction in English — Virtual Lotus: Modern Fiction of Southeast Asia — a seven year project. Currently, she is editing a companion volume, The History and Cultural Significance of Modern Southeast Asian Fiction. As of summer 2002, she has organized the "Nou Hach Literary Journal," devoted to modern Cambodian literature and cultural studies. Its electronic version is found on the web site http://members.freespeech.org/southeast-asian-literature. In 2003 funding for this project was received from the Toyota Foundation for 2003-5. It enables a daily radio spot foregrounding Khmer poetry, creative writing workshops, and the publication of the Nou Hach Journal. The Journal is scheduled for publication in Fall 2004. This will be the first literary journal to be published in Cambodia since the 1970s (b. 1984). [home page]