BUDDHIST VIEWS OF NATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The course looks at Buddhist views of nature and the environment both historically and now. In the first part, we will examine Buddhist-inspired worldviews that saw human beings as an integral part of a cosmos dominated by nature. In the second part, we will focus on Chinese Buddhist representations of nonhuman animals and human-animal relations. In the third part we will analyze Buddhist-inspired technology in the sense of an application of knowledge that connects us inter-subjectively and with the material world. We will focus on Buddhist-inspired non-human actants, artifacts, hermeneutics, textual forms, and infrastructures, that have extended human capacities.

By the end of this course unit students should normally:

1. Have gained a very good knowledge and critical understanding of the main topics of the course;
2. Have gained an understanding of the continuities and discontinuities between the modern and with pre-modern periods;
3. Be able to find and use critically a range of materials including books, journals, primary sources, and web-based resources relevant to the topics studied in the course.
4. Write a research paper on the basis of their study of primary and secondary sources.

The class is discussion-based and is supplemented by lectures, presentations, and documentary films. You will take away from this course a firm understanding of the changes affected by modernity and globalization on Buddhist ideas of nature, the supernatural and the netherworld.

Advanced reading, speaking and writing knowledge of English.

Buddhism, nature, technology, modernity, East Asia, China, Taiwan, ecology, water. We will focus on Buddhist-inspired non-human actants, artifacts, hermeneutics, textual forms, and infrastructures, that have extended human capacities.

Johan Elverskog, The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia. Selected essays and multimedia material available on the Moodle platform.

Students will be expected complete a set of diverse tasks and online assignments using the Moodle platform. A good response paper will be between 20 to 300 words. These amount to 30% of the final grade.

FINAL RESEARCH PAPER:
For their final project, students must write a research paper on a topic of their choice. The length of this paper should be 20 pages for graduate students and contain a detailed bibliography (70% of the final grade).

Flipped classroom; experiential learning; fieldwork; digital archives and oral history projects

English

All classes and reading materials are in English.

written