Buddhist Studies

Topics in the Study of Buddhism. This course will focus on specific themes, developments, and issues in the study of Buddhism. The course is intended to supplement our regular curricular offerings, and the content will change from semester to semester.

Fall 2017: "Buddhist Mongolian Ritual." A fundamental objective of soteriological religion, be it Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam, has been to bring individual peoples together as one in peace. The tremendous success these traditions have known has obscured not only what a world of disparate worlds once looked like but also how soteriological traditions went about the process of unification. This course examines one import instrument of that process, ritual. Specifically it examines how ritual was used at once to nationalize the fiefdoms of the noble descendants of Chinggis Khan into a unified Mongolian people and at the same time to catholicize Mongols into a greater Gelugpa Buddhist world. Through examination of ritual texts in translation we will see how Gelugpa chaplains assimilated the rituals of the Mongol’s imperial tradition. Rituals we will examine concern cults of Heaven, Chinggis Khan, a “White Old Man,” Masquerade, Games, Horses, Fire, Stone Cairns, Hunting, and more. We will study these rituals in their historical context and observe as well how scholars, in the name of their own “Modern” world have traditionally interpreted such rituals in the context of “shamanism.”