James Marks received a B.A. in Philosophy from Eugene Lang College The New School in 2009, and an M.T.S in Buddhist Studies from Harvard Divinity School in 2012. He is primarily interested in Indian Buddhist philosophy, especially concerning debates over the nature of the self, both within Buddhism and between Buddhist and other Indian philosophical traditions. He completed his dissertation in 2019.
Emphasis: Sanskrit/India
Dissertation: Playfighting: Encountering Aviddhakarna and Bhāvivikta in Śāntarakshita’s Tattvasamgraha and Kamalaśīla’s Pañjikā. 2019
Matthew McMullen completed his Ph.D. in 2016. He is an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Permanent Fellow at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture (http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/(link is external)) at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan, where he serves as the editor of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies (...
Changhwan Park is a Research Professor at the Geumgang Center for Buddhist Studies, Geumgang University, Chungnam, South Korea. He 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 completed his dissertation entitled "The Sautrantika Theory of Seeds (bija) Revisited: With Special Reference to the Ideological Continuity between Vasubandhu's Theory of Seeds and its Srilata/Darstantika Precursors" in 2007 and is...
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...
Dissertation: The Perpetuity of the Dharma: A Study and Translation of Da Aluohan Nantimiduoluo Suoshuo Fazhu Ji[electronic resource](link is external). 2002. 269 p.
Daniel Stuart received his Ph.D. in 2012, under the supervision of Alexander von Rospatt. His dissertation, entitled A Less Traveled Path: Meditation and Textual Practice in the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthāna(sūtra), deals with the history of Buddhist meditation in Northwest India during the first half of the first millennium CE. Over the years, Daniel has worked extensively on Buddhist sūtra literature and Buddhist manuscripts in various Asian languages and scripts. He works primarily with Sanskrit and Pāli materials, but also works with Indic...
Kenneth Tanaka taught at the Institute of Buddhist Studies of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California before being appointed professor of Buddhist Studies at Musashino University, Tokyo in 1998. He currently serves as President of the International Association of Shin Buddhist Studies, and had been an active member of the International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter sessions centered at Purdue University. His publications include, 1) The Dawn of Chinese Pure Land Buddhist Doctrine: Ching-ying Hui-yuan's Commentary to the Visualization Sutra. (The State...
Dissertation: Searching for the Origins of Mahāyāna and Moving toward a Better Understanding of Early Mahāyāna[electronic resource](link is external). 1997. 241 p.
Dissertation: Mea Maxima Vikalpa: Repentance, Meditation, and the Dynamics of Liberation in Medieval Chinese Buddhism, 500-650 CE[electronic resource](link is external). 2002. 274 p.
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...
