Varied Approaches to Teaching Buddhism

The 2022 film Everything Everywhere All At Once has become an instant and award-winning classic due to its novel and bold storytelling. Given the dense symbolism within the film, I will begin showing it in my class “Religions of China and Japan,” starting in the summer of 2023, as a pedagogical exercise. This paper will first argue that Everything Everywhere All At Once is indeed an allegorical Buddhist film, using John Whalen-Bridge’s categorization scheme. Then I will discuss and examine the results of my students’ observations, with the intent of assigning a reflection paper after watching the film in class to see how my students tease out the various elements of Buddhism the film exhibits. This exercise will thus begin to build a repertoire of observations to strengthen not only my students’ understanding of Buddhism, but to contribute to the rapidly growing literature about the film.

This paper treats Buddhist pedagogy in the undergraduate classroom as it relates to the topic of Buddhism and ecology. A distinct strategy of the pedagogy is to trace the occurrence of a specific natural phenomena, in this case trees, throughout the history of the Buddhist tradition. An outcome of this approach is to locate what I am calling an Arboreal Buddhism within the history of the tradition.  In addition, the paper reflects on how the 2022 NEH Summer Institute “The Ritual Arts of Hinduism and Buddhism” shaped the presenter’s pedagogical approach to the topic. Two aims of the Institute were to promote emphasis on popular expressions of religion and to move religious art and ritual from periphery to center in teaching Buddhism. In that spirit, the paper describes a pedagogy that makes extensive use of the visual, poetic, and narrative arts of Buddhism in the presentation of its topic.

What do students hear when we talk of mindfulness? To reframe unexamined assumptions among students that conceptualize both mindfulness and honors education as “doing more” (more exercises to gain psychological benefits, and more work to gain higher GPAs) the authors of this paper piloted a new course. In this paper, they discuss their collaborative experience designing, co-teaching, and assessing an honors course on mindfulness: its roots in Buddhist thought and practices, and its contemporary secular developments. Integral to this experiment is also an approach to teaching philosophy, ethics and religious studies in the context of a general education curriculum, that aims at presenting the disciplines and their focus areas as forms of experiential learning.

There is a need to articulate pedagogies for “ministry of presence” in Buddhist education. Ministry of presence is what keeps teaching and learning alive in the classroom. Modeling ministry of presence is staying connected, deeply listening, and being open to the unknown. To have alive encounters in the classroom where real learning occurs, educators may need to facilitate different methods of learning that incorporate a whole-person education. This project will draw upon Buddhist primary and secondary sources, as well as the experiences of Buddhist monastics, ministers, and educators from multiple traditions to create a Buddhist-centered pedagogy. Buddhist ministry of presence can serve as an important pedagogical model that provides practical methods for educators to use in the classroom. Such methods can more effectively address suffering, incorporate self-care, and navigate conflict while remaining grounded in body and mind.