Category Archives: Buddhism

Brook Ziporyn’s talk on Tiantai Buddhism at Rutgers on Thursday, Oct. 23 (updated: hybrid format)

Brook Ziporyn (University of Chicago), will give a talk, “Everything Everywhere All at Once: The Buddha-Nature According to Tiantai and What To Do About It, If Anything,” at Rutgers New Brunswick campus on Thursday, October 23, 2025, 4-5:30pm. Here’s the link to the talk:

https://rccs.rutgers.edu/events/events-list/icalrepeat.detail/2025/10/23/2454/-/everything-everywhere-all-at-once-the-buddha-nature-according-to-tiantai-and-what-to-do-about-it-if-anything-brook-ziporyn-university-of-chicago

The talk is also available on Zoom. Check the website for the registration link. Please drop me a note if you are coming in person. Thanks.

Online Course: Worldmodels & Ontologies: Visions of Reality in Chinese Thought

The online course “Worldmodels & Ontologies: Visions of Reality in Chinese Thought” will be running from Thursday, 16 October to Thursday, 18 December 2025. This seminar is designed in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Zurich, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and National Chengchi University (NCCU). Scholars, students, and practitioners are warmly invited to join this collaborative exploration of how different textual traditions in China have structured their visions of reality. Please find the course description and schedule here.
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Job Opening: Position in SEA Buddhist Philosophy at NIU

Northern Illinois University is hiring for a tenure track position in Philosophy and Southeast Asian studies with a focus on Buddhist philosophy. Candidates trained and active in Philosophy and also strongly grounded in one or more countries and Buddhist traditions in Southeast Asia are strongly encouraged to apply. Please visit the NIU website for more information.

Episode 20 of “This Is the Way”: Confucianism vs. Buddhism (our first “live show”)

One influential justification for becoming Buddhist is to end suffering, starting (it seems) with the Buddhist practitioner’s own suffering. Does this indicate that Buddhist practitioners are selfish? After Buddhism became popular in China, many Confucians argued that Buddhism puts personal salvation before ethics, and is thus selfish in that respect. Some Confucians also objected to the particular sort of compassion that Buddhists were supposed to adopt (“unconditioned compassion”), insisting that it was fundamentally incompatible with the special attachments needed for important human relationships between family members and close friends.

In our first show before a live audience, Justin presents two criticisms of Buddhism, Jenny Hung 洪真如 defends Buddhism against the criticisms, and Richard moderates. The show was held at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, and many wiser experts in the audience weighed in as well. Join us for the lively (and quite friendly) “debate.” Continue reading →

New Book: Berger, Introducing Chinese Philosophy

Douglas L. Berger, Introducing Chinese Philosophy: From the Warring States to the 21st Century has been recently published through Routledge. The book presents an introductory survey of the major themes, thinkers and texts, philosophical genres and profound insights of the Chinese philosophical tradition. Its coverage ranges from the foundational history of Chinese thought in the 6th–5th centuries BCE up to the present day.

To access the book for further reading, please visit this site.

New Book: Tiwald, The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Philosophy

May be a graphic of text that says 'THEOXFORD THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF Chinese Philosophy c editedby teo USTIN JUSTINTIWAL TIWALD'The Handbook of Chinese Philosophy has recently been released online by Oxford University Press, with paper copies set to release in August. The handbook collects new work on important texts and figures in the history of Chinese thought. The chapters cover both well-known texts such as the Analects and the Zhuangzi and many of the lesser-known thinkers in the classical and postclassical Chinese tradition. Most of the chapters focus on thinkers or texts in one of three important historical movements. These include classical (“pre-Qin”) Chinese philosophy, Chinese Buddhism, and the Confucian response to Buddhism (“neo-Confucianism” broadly construed). Each chapter presents cutting-edge work on important topics in the Chinese tradition and yet is written for a general philosophical audience. For more information, please see this site, and the Table of Contents follows.

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