Spreading Indra’s Net in Manhattan: D. T. Suzuki’s Columbia University Lectures on Kegon Buddhism

In spring, 1952, D. T. Suzuki began a series of seminars at Columbia University concerning the development of Chinese Buddhism, culminating in the study of the Buddhist path as presented in the Kegonkyo¯ (Avatamsaka Su? tra). Using a range of recently uncovered archival sources, I will discuss Suzuki’s presentation of Buddhism and the wideranging influence of his seminars on American culture and religious life.

Speakers

RICHARD JAFFE is Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University. He received his Ph.D. in religious studies with a concentration in Buddhist studies from Yale University in 1995. His research afocuses on Japanese Buddhism during the early modern and modern periods, Asian Buddhist modernism, panAsianism, and nationalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is the author of Neither Monk nor Layman: Clerical Marriage in Modern Japanese Buddhism (2002) and Seeking Shakyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism (2019). He has also edited the four volume Selected Works of D. T. Suzuki. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Humanities Center, and the American Council on Learned Societies.