Syllabi
Sacred Tree with Written Wishes and Amulets Outside of the Temple to Confucius (Kongmiao 孔廟), Tainan, Taiwan. Photography Taken by Tobias Benedikt Zürn in Spring 2005.
Of Zombies, Ghosts, and Ancestors: Interactions of the Living and the Dead in pre-modern chinESE LITERATURE
This course introduces a basic aspect of the multifaceted history of Chinese religions, culture, and civilization by centering on the practice of taking care of the dead. In particular, we will observe how various religious texts, short stories, and plays from China's earliest times until the sixteenth century depicted the interactions of the living and the dead. Despite the distinct genres, time periods, and topics, one important aspect will regularly appear: apparently people perceived the boundaries between the living and the dead to be quite porous in pre-modern China. In other words, the dead seemed to have played as much of a role in society and everyday life as living family members, friends, and government officials.
Exorcistic Amulets (fu 符) Related to the Deified Supreme Lord Lao (Taishang Laojun 太上老君), from Volume of Collected Registers and Amulets (Zong lufu ben 總錄符本), Hunan.
The Body in Daoism
The Body! There is probably no other phenomenon in the world that is as directly experienceable and tangible and at the same time as disconcerting and opaque due to its unforeseeable and hardly controllable responses as our own physique. Paul Valery mentions in his essay “Some Reflections on the Body” that it “is so much mine and yet so mysteriously and sometimes—always, in the end—our most redoubtable antagonist; [it] is the most urgent, the most constant and the most variable thing imaginable.” (p. 399) This variable, yet at the same time constant aspect of the body made Shigehisa Kuriyama puzzle at the beginning of his book on The Expressiveness of the Body how “perceptions of something as basic and intimate as the body [can] differ so?” (p. 8). In this course, we will enageg in conceptualizations of the human corpus that are quite distinct to our modern-day perceptions and explore early and medieval Daoist visions of the body as a microreplica of the cosmos and its impact on various practices such as meditation on body gods and Inner Alchemy. We will use these perspectives as an opportunity to question our own understandings that are mainly influenced by a dichotomy between the body and soul/psyche as developed in a Euro-Christian context and its materialization in the modern disciplines of medicine and psychology. In other words, we will delve into Daoist conceptualizations of the body in order to understand the emphases and some of the limitations of our own preconceived notions that are far from being universal or exhaustive, yet heavily determine our actions.
Yu Xunling (1874-1943), The Empress Dowager Cixi in the Guise of Guanyin, 1903. Glass Negative. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives Collection, SC-GR-246
Introduction to east asian religions
This course introduces fundamental features of several Eastern religious traditions. We will focus on the idea of ritual as a transformative tool and observe its manifold manifestations in three religious communities: Buddhism, Shinto, and Daoism. We will encounter such diverse practices as ritualized self-immolation, bodily possession, and biospiritual self-cultivation. These techniques are all linked to the idea that a ritual performance may trigger a transformative process in practitioners and/or their surroundings. In our case, they transform practitioners into an enlightened being (Buddhism), into a vessel that may host godly spirits (Shinto), and into a powerful catalyzer that exudes the nourishing and ordering powers of the cosmos (Daoism). While this course is a general introduction to East Asian religious cultures, it is also a course in critical thinking. Drawing upon examples from China and Japan, we will consider ways people have thought about their worlds and have acted on those thoughts in the world. We will also examine the ways other people (including ourselves) have thought about those people's ideas and activities. In order to inspire such moments of reflection, we will regularly engage in experiential and experimental exercises such as the throwing of pottery or playing Pokemon Go as a means to create moments in which you may personally and sensually relate to some aspects of these religious practices. Hence, we strive to learn from these religious communities' distinctiveness in this course in order to engage with our own prejudices and convictions, a transformative goal we may only achieve through direct involvement with their practices and ideas.