Anne Mocko, University of Chicago

Anne Mocko is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago Divinity School, specializing in the history of religions. In addition to teaching at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Mocko has also taught at the University of Chicago humanities core as a course instructor and writing instructor. Mocko is working on finishing her dissertation, Demoting Vishnu: Ritual, Politics, and the Unmaking of Nepal’s Monarchy, which documents the remarkable roles ritual has played in Nepal’s recent political transitions as the country has moved from a Hindu monarchy to a secular republic. Her most recent publications include “Ritual Replacement and the Unmaking of Monarchy” (In Ritual Innovation in South Asian Traditions, edited by Pennington and Allocco, forthcoming from the State University of New York Press) and “On Tree Marriage and Encountering the Rituals of Others,” featured on the University of Chicago’s Religion and Culture Web Forum.

Buddhism — the “Familiar Other”?

I was given the opportunity in the spring of this year to teach a course on Buddhism at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Initially I presumed that I was primarily being asked to design an exercise in familiarization — to make traditions that were unfamiliar to students become familiar — because I assumed that I would be introducing Asian traditions to a class predominantly composed of Anglo-Protestant students. However, I did not assume that Buddhism would be utterly foreign to these hypothetical students. After all, Buddhism has been something of an exotic pet for Protestant Americans (and Europeans) since the nineteenth century (Thomas A. Tweed; Philip C. Almond) and so I assumed that students entering my class would already have some passing familiarity with Buddhist traditions in some form or another. Indeed, they might already be quite taken with a highly romanticized view of Buddhism.

Since I imagined that Buddhism would be a “familiar other” to my students, I decided to try to structure my course in a slightly more complex way, rather than simply introducing an unfamiliar thing. I decided instead to simultaneously introduce Buddhist terms, practices, and concepts and problematize the ideas of Buddhism they were likely to have encountered in popular representations; in other words to challenge the basic ideas I presumed they would “know” — that “Buddhism is a philosophy not a religion,” that “Buddhism has no gods,” and so forth. I began this program of balancing familiarity and unfamiliarity by titling my course “Many Buddhisms,” inspired by the challenge issued by Don Lopez in his introduction to The Story of Buddhism: A Concise Guide to Its History and Teachings (HarperCollins, 2001). Right from the start, then, I hoped that students would consider the ostensible object of our study — Buddhism — to be something of a moving target, something plural, various, and surprising.

In preparing my syllabus, I primarily designed the topics and readings in conversation with, but largely in opposition to, the “Introduction to Buddhism” course which I myself had been in over a decade ago as an undergraduate, and which had first introduced me to the subject. Where my own introduction to Buddhism had primarily involved philosophical debates and texts, I wanted to introduce my own students to rituals, devotional traditions, and chanting. I wanted to give these students, as best as I could, a taste of embodied, lived Buddhist cultures that were a revelation to me when I began traveling to Japan and then to Nepal.

In large part I used traditional classroom techniques in my quest to convey “Buddhisms” as lived practices. I assigned readings that not only laid out the historical development of various Buddhist movements, but also detailed monastic education practices in Tibet, analyzed stupa-building in ancient India, discussed gendered religious vocations in Thailand, and presented self-burning and self-burial practices in China and Japan. I played the students audio recordings of Sri Lankan monks taking refuge, Tibetan monks reciting liturgical texts, and Pure Land Buddhists calling on Amida Buddha. I tried to show video footage of Buddhists in action at least once a week, including video material I had shot myself at a Newar Buddhist baha in Nepal. It also turns out that YouTube has a remarkably large number of videos taken in various parts of Buddhist Asia.

In teaching many Buddhisms and focusing on lived practice, I was not entirely satisfied with traditional classroom methods. I also decided to look for ways to get the students to go to actual centers of worship, to develop a more robust, lived sense of this “other” religion. In part, I wanted to include an experiential learning component to my course because I had aimed to introduce students to Buddhist culture and practice, not just Buddhist ideas. I remembered how my own understanding of Buddhism was revolutionized, in a seminar entitled “Buddhism in the Modern World,” by a weekend-long field trip in college to Washington, D.C. — the next best experience to actually traveling to Asia. Fortunately, in the present transnational context, there are increasing numbers of Buddhist centers in the United States that are staffed and attended by immigrant Asian communities, offering an experience not identical to, but certainly inspired by and contiguous with, cultural traditions “back home.” In the Chicago area alone there are more than a dozen Buddhist centers from various traditions, including Chinese, Thai, Burmese, Japanese, and Vietnamese worship spaces and communities.

Having decided on a temple trip (or trips) as a key goal for my course, I sat down with the department head supervising my course to discuss logistics. I fairly immediately discounted the notion of organizing a required field trip, based on logistical difficulties with both the timing and the possibilities for transporting the whole class. Instead, I decided to make temple visits an optional but highly recommended part of the course. I would organize three field trips on weekends over the course of the semester and provide students a list of area Buddhist centers that they could visit on their own. Students would be required to submit three papers over the course of the quarter, and would have the option to write one, two, or all of their papers based on field visits (rather than the preselected texts I offered for students who did not wish or were not able to make special scheduling arrangements). In this way, I hoped that I would give students the flexibility to explore Buddhist sites and practices in Chicago without being overburdened by out-of-class requirements.

This scheme worked quite well — and in fact between a third and one half of the students in the class visited at least one Buddhist site during the semester — but the dynamics of the assignment and indeed the course as a whole were impacted in ways I had not anticipated by the demographics and lived realities of the students who actually showed up for my course. Where I had been expecting an overwhelmingly Anglo-Protestant class, I actually got a class that was exactly half Asian, many of whom had either themselves grown up in Asia or whose parents had done so. This meant that many of the traditions I had assumed would be “foreign” and “other” to my students were in fact “familiar” to a significant number of them — whether through routine practices of their own or through family legacies. This also meant that I was not the only expert in the room; instead, many of the Asian students added their own perspectives during class discussions, talked with me about aspects of their heritage they had never understood before, and were not shy about comparing my lectures against the dharma-talks they heard at temple. I found this a wonderful — and wonderfully challenging — situation.

Regarding the field-trip scheme, the unexpected dynamics of my class forced me to promptly evaluate and clarify the purpose of the assignment. I had been assuming that the purpose of field trips would be to expose students to a thoroughly novel experience, but suddenly I encountered students asking if they could write papers based on the temples they already went to on a routine basis. I decided to allow this form of self-study, on the grounds that everyday experiences may look different through an academic lens, and I ended up scheduling two of the organized group trips to temples attended by students in the class. I did succeed in persuading students to stretch themselves, though, and several students who do have a Buddhist heritage did end up going to a temple outside their family’s tradition.

The class did not turn entirely into a course of Asian students studying Asian subjects, for many in the class were not Asian; because the course fulfilled a general education requirement, many were entering the class with no knowledge of Buddhism whatsoever. This meant that for many students in the class, every reading, lecture, or class discussion was novel, sometimes even revelatory, and many students were indeed engaged in familiarizing themselves with something radically new. When it came time for the field trips to Buddhist worship centers, several of the Catholic students in the course opted to attend, and these students uniformly reported that it was the first time any of them had ever entered a non-Catholic worship space. This meant that the same information, discussion, or experience was encountered quite differently by the different students in the class — a fact that is probably always true to some degree in any classroom (particularly a religious studies classroom), but was particularly prominent and important to the dynamics of this course.

In fact, though, it was not always possible to break the class down into students who already were “experts” or “insiders” and students who were not. Even for students who might have recognized and participated in some of the traditions covered in the course material, other aspects of the course tended to prove surprising, for Buddhist practices stretch so widely and variably across Asia that the students who grew up in Vietnamese families hardly recognized Sri Lankan practices, while the student who grew up in Thailand was profoundly challenged by Chinese and Japanese Pure Land traditions. Thus, there was no simple way for me to present course material as either familiar or foreign to my students, no simple “us” I could presume as my audience, even from class meeting to class meeting. Almost invariably, material for the course was familiar to some and foreign to others, tedious, startling, or novel to various degrees, and challenging as a mix to all — including to me.

Someone, at some time, told me that higher education in the humanities and social sciences has two purposes — to make familiar things seem strange, and to make strange things seem familiar. This has always seemed intuitively right to me, although in my most recent teaching experience, this aphorism has turned out to be rather more complicated — not an “either/or” but a “both/and” proposition. In this course, I found myself teaching in a remarkable transnational context, where distances and divisions broke down or became more flexible, and the classroom became an experiment for the effects of a world of populations on the move. This offered me and my students an extraordinary opportunity for contact, and it allowed me to introduce students quite immediately to worlds, thought-ways, and traditions that only a decade ago would have remained abstractions on paper.

It also, though, presented a challenge in trying to calculate my pedagogy and anticipate the backgrounds and assumptions of my students. I found it difficult to figure out when and how my task was to problematize a familiar thing and when to familiarize a foreign thing, for my students did not share — with my imagined classroom or with each other — a consistent sense of what material conformed to which category. Perhaps it was always unwarranted to presume that classrooms were anything approaching homogenous, or that there was a standard American collegiate viewpoint against which material could be evaluated and an instructor could choose a single rhetorical stance. All I know is that the perspectives my students brought to my class were far more varied, rich, and interesting than I had anticipated. I went into “Many Buddhisms” expecting to introduce a largely Caucasian, middle-class, U.S.-born “us” to the Buddhist “others” I had spent the last several years learning about and getting to know. What I found instead was that a good number of Buddhist “others” were sitting there in my classroom, ready to learn new material — but equally ready to share with the class their experiences growing up in Buddhist households. In this transnational context, the geographical and intellectual divides between “us” and “others” broke down, and my class was much the better for it.

I believe there are several lessons to be learned here. First, it is salutary to remember that, even in an introductory course, the students in the class can be a resource for the instructor to learn from, just as the instructor is a resource from which the students can learn. It is beneficial to the students to see their instructors truly open to hearing their perspectives. Second, it is helpful to consider in advance the possibility of multiple — perhaps many wildly divergent — student perspectives on any class’s material, and to look for ways to enrich students from whichever perspective they begin. In my case, it was not necessarily difficult making room in the class for many perspectives; the non-Buddhist students in the class considered Buddhism to be “cool” and automatically granted respect to their Buddhist peers.

But what about teaching less “cool” subjects with more divisive potential, such as Islam or Evangelical Christianity? While I do believe it is possible to create meaningful intellectual exchanges over tendentious subjects, other classroom conversations may require more active, conscious intervention than did my “Many Buddhisms.” To my mind, though, the existence of student commitments and life experiences is not a difficulty or a liability, but rather one of the most exciting reasons to teach religious studies. Because students often come to our classrooms with strong opinions and commitments, the task is not to make students interested, but to take their prerational responses to religion and teach them how to think, talk, and write systematically about them.

This is a wonderful responsibility — all the more so as the world opens up and classrooms across America cease to be restricted to the classic “American” faith commitments. As practitioners of all the “world religions” become part of our direct conversations, there is no comfortable place to be a supposedly neutral, secure “us.” Our new, transnational moment is an exciting, if slightly unpredictable, time to be in the classroom.