David Hall earned his Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley in 1990 specializing in East Asian Esoteric Buddhism and military history. Trained as a Navy Hospital Corpsman in the late 1960s, David Hall was attached to Third Marine Division during the Vietnam War Era. Ordained as a Tendai Buddhist priest (1978), he integrated his religious training in Japan with graduate research at U.C. Berkeley. He has published The Buddhist Goddess Marishiten: A Study of the Evolution and Impact of Her Cult on the Japanese Warrior(link is external)(Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic / Global Oriental, 2014). This work provides an in-depth exploration of the Buddhist cult of the warrior goddess Mārīcī and its efficacy as experienced by the Japanese warrior class. In examining the psychological effects of these rituals, this volume moves beyond a narrowly focused examination of a religious cult to illustrate how these rituals not only prepared the warrior for combat, but also acted as an antidote for the toxicity of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) when the warrior returned from the battlefield. Hall has also published the Encyclopedia of Japanese Martial Arts(link is external)(New York: Kodansha USA, 2012). This work contains around 4,000 Japanese entries with bilingual entry headings and concise definitions covering numerous martial arts in Japan. Following the main portion of the work are several Appendices (Traditional East Asian Numbering Systems and Ancient Period Military Organization), as well as a Selected Bibliography, a Character Index of approximately 6,000 terms with additional indices in Chinese, Sanskrit, and English.
Hall is currently Professor of Information Technology at Montgomery College. In addition to holding posts as Chairman and Acting Dean of the Information Technology Institute, he was MC Director and Co-PI of CyberWatch, a National Science Foundation funded consortium of colleges and universities developing cybersecurity curriculum and programs from 2003 until 2013.
Emphasis: Japanese
Dissertation: Marishiten: Buddhism and the Warrior Goddess[electronic resource](link is external). 1990. 426 p.