Religion 275: Reading Buddhism: Exploring Buddhism through its Formative Texts

This course offers an in-depth exploration of a wide variety of texts drawn from across Buddhist traditions. Buddhist literature is vast in scope and extremely rich in imagination, offering to its readers a fantastic world populated by Buddhas, advanced bodhisattvas, heavenly paradises, supernatural occurrences, profound philosophical discussions, and enigmatic words of wisdom. We will focus both on placing these texts within their proper historical context within the development of Buddhism and engaging them creatively as modern readers. Taken together, this literature can help us learn to think and imagine otherwise possibilities for relating to the world and moving forward into the twenty-first century. May be taken for credit toward the South Asia and Humanistic Inquiry requirements of the South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies major.