Humanities Core: How to be Modern in East Asia

Catalog description

This course explores how religion has shaped the modern East Asian world through an examination of Tibetan Buddhist culture and history. Tibetan Buddhism played a fundamental role in the Chinese transition to modernity and has enjoyed an enduring relevance not only in modern Tibet and China, but also in other parts of Asia and globally. We will explore how religious practice, literature, and art interconnect with political power, ethnicity, nationalism, and scientific development to revisit common perceptions of Tibet as a culturally isolated place of religion and of East Asian modernity as a steady turn to secularization. We will also look at the contemporary traces of this process within American and Asian-American Buddhist communities. This course is part of the Humanities Core: https://humanitiescore.stanford.edu/