 |
Sheng Yen Assistant Professor of Chinese Buddhism
Departmental Area: History and Ethnography of Religions Address: Department of Religion News Item: Sheng Yen Professorship in Chinese Buddhist Studies and Fellowship for Graduate Students |
Background
Jimmy Yu (Ph.D. '08, Princeton University, Department of Religion) teaches courses in East Asian religious traditions, with an emphasis in Buddhism and Chinese religions. His research interests include the history of the body in Chinese religions, Buddhist material culture, Chan/Zen Buddhisms, and popular religious movements within the broader context of fifteenth to seventeenth centuries China. Dr. Yu is also a grant committee advisor of the Sheng Yen Education Foundation Grant for Ph.D. Dissertation Research on Modern Chinese Buddhism.
His first book, Sanctity and Self-Inflicted Violence in Chinese Religions, 1500-1700 (Oxford University Press, 2012), explores self-inflicted violence as an essential and sanctioned part of premodern Chinese culture. He examines a wide range of practices, including blood writing, filial body-slicing, chastity mutilations and suicides, ritual exposure, and self-immolation, arguing that each practice was public, scripted, and a signal of cultural expectations. Individuals engaged in acts of self-inflicted violence to exercise power and to affect society, by articulating moral values, reinstituting order, forging new social relations, and protecting against the threat of moral ambiguity. Self-inflicted violence was intelligible both to the person doing the act and to those who viewed and interpreted it, regardless of the various religions of the period. This book is a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on bodily practices in late imperial China, challenging preconceived ideas about analytic categories of religion, culture, and ritual in the study of Chinese religions.
His second and current book project focuses on the formation of a new religious movement, the Dharma Drum Lineage of Chan (DDLC), within Chinese Buddhism. The book will be the first full-length monograph of Chan Buddhism in modern times in any language and the first study of Sheng Yen, the founder of DDLC , in the English language.
Research and Teaching Interests
- Asceticism and bodily practices
- Death rituals and salvation in East Asian religions
- Buddhist material culture
- Doctrinal developments in Chinese Buddhism
- Systems of Buddhist meditation practice
- Chan/Zen Buddhisms
Recent Courses
Fall 2012
REL3340 The Buddhist Tradition
This course is a historical and thematic survey of Buddhism from its beginnings through the modern period. Topics covered include origins and history, doctrine, ethical beliefs, meditation, ritual, and monastic and popular traditions. Some attention will also be given to contemporary forms of Buddhism in America. Part I of this course begins with some foundational concepts in Buddhism. Part II explores the Buddhist schools, theories, and practices in different regions of the world and over a span of 2,500 years.
REL4359/5346 Seminar: Pure Land Buddhism
Over the centuries, “Pure Land Buddhism” has evolved into a tradition that was at once diffused into all other schools of Chinese Buddhism and yet had the propensity to be singled out from the rest of this matrix of Mahāyana Buddhist practice as a comprehensive path, discrete onto itself. This seminar will examine the doctrine and cultural practices related to “Pure Land Buddhism” as a site for the construction—or, as the case may be, contestation—of Buddhist values, roles, and identities within the larger field of Chinese religious life.
REL5319 Classical Chinese Texts and Historiography, 1000-1900
This is a seminar in the reading of selected primary sources in classical Chinese for the study of Chinese history and religions. The course focuses on introducing students to a variety of tools and methods for the study of Chinese history and religion, including standard lexical and bibliographic references, digital resources, canonical literature, ritual manuals, poetry, and hagiographies, local gazetteers and secondary scholarship in modern languages. The course is made up of weekly group exercises. Special permission from the professor is required to register.