From Knowledge and Liberation to Unbounded Wholeness through The Great Bliss Queen: In Honor of Anne C. Klein

Over the past two-and-a-half decades, Professor Anne C. Klein has pioneered new pathways in the academic study of Buddhist Studies, Gender Studies, and Contemplative Studies. To honor her celebrated career in the academy, this roundtable convenes scholars and students to discuss her many contributions, including her eight books. Presentations from the six panelists will foreground discrete aspects of the multiple epistemologies at work in Klein’s publications from Geluk discourse between Sautrantika and Madhyamaka in Knowledge and Liberation (1987) and Knowing, Naming, and Negation (1997) to gender-specific ways of knowing in Meeting the Great Bliss Queen (1995) to the logic of the nonconceptual in Unbounded Wholeness (2006) to epistemologies of perfection in her forthcoming, Being Human and a Buddha Too (2023). Each panelist, either as a scholar influenced by her work or as a graduate student mentored by Klein, will discuss how different ways of knowing – first-person, gendered, textualized, and so forth – are present in Klein’s body of work, giving the roundtable discussion a syncretically whole epistemological theme.