This paper explores ways instructors might approach their teaching and their students’ learning about lived Buddhism, so that they can determine which might work for their own students at their specific institutions. Framing my discussion around the seven characteristics of religious practice identified by Nancy Ammerman—embodiment, materiality, emotional, aesthetics, moral judgment, narrative structuring, and spirituality (2020, p. 9)—I show how each dimension lends itself to a particular pedagogical approach. Embodied and sensory-based learning facilitates the study of embodiment, place-based learning directs students’ attention towards materiality; affective learning strengthens their awareness of emotions; arts-based learning encourages their critical reflection about aesthetics; applied learning assists in their moral judgment; storytelling enables them to appreciate narrative structuring, and contemplative and integrative learning supports their study of spirituality. As we make a particular aspect of religious practice salient for our students, we provide a way for them to analyze lived Buddhism without compromising the diversity and heterogeneity of those lived experiences.
Embodied and sensory-based learning activities increase our students’ body awareness and awaken their senses (Hracht 2021). They enable students to understand how sense perceptions, physical environments, and worldviews inextricably linked in lived Buddhism. While embodiment foregrounds the body that senses and engages with things in the world, materiality draws attention to material things and material spaces—their look, smell, sound, and taste—and the context in which practitioners experience them. We can use sensory-based learning to focus our student’s attention on the materiality of Buddhist practice by having them closely examine a particular Buddhist image, statue, or mural painting, or deeply listen to chants, temple bells, gongs and drums, or smell burning incense. Site visits and study abroad programs provide ideal means for students to experience materiality firsthand.
Affective learning encourages us to attune to the circulation of emotions in our classrooms. If we make space for emotions in our classrooms, we can enable our students to better understand the relationship between their assumptions and affective responses (Minister 2023). Buddhists often see cognitive and affective states as interdependent, and the Buddha’s teaching about the inevitability of suffering is itself an emotional truth. Stories, films, art, and ethnographic studies provide entry points for exploring the emotional lives of Buddhists. Arts-based learning enables students to explore the way that sensory experiences can be mediated and shaped by culture, religion, and society. We can invite our students to reflect on the way their own perception is informed by their senses, how their social location has shaped that perception, and how they might reexamine such sensibilities after learning about ways that others have perceived and understood such media.
In other words, I propose an intersubjective approach to teaching lived Buddhism. As researchers, we attend to what Buddhists say and do in their everyday lives. As teachers, we should similarly attend to our students’ lived experience, so that in our classes, we can facilitate their pivoting between their own worldview and those of Buddhists. As Robert Orsi writes, “The challenge of a lived religion approach is to balance carefully and self-reflectively on the border between familiarity and difference, strangeness and recognizability, whether in relation to people in the past or in another cultural world.” (Orsi 2003, 174) The challenge of teaching lived Buddhism is balancing not only in relation to the Buddhists we study, but also the students that we teach.
References
Ammerman, Nancy. 2020. “Rethinking Religion: Toward a Practice Approach.” American Journal of Sociology 126, no. 1 (July): 6-51.
Hrach, Susan. 2021. Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.
Minister, M. Cooper. 2023. “Grief and Joy in the Religious Studies Classroom.” In Teaching Critical Religious Studies: Pedagogy and Critique in the Classroom, edited by Jenna Gray-Hildenbrand, Beverley McGuire, and Hussein Rashid, 42-52. New York: Bloomsbury.
Orsi, Robert. 2003. “Is the Study of Lived Religion Irrelevant to the World We Live In?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42.2: 169-74.
This paper explores various ways instructors might approach their teaching and their students’ learning about lived Buddhism, so that they can determine which might work for their own students at their specific institutions. Framing my discussion around the seven characteristics of religious practice identified by Nancy Ammerman—embodiment, materiality, emotional, aesthetics, moral judgment, narrative structuring, and spirituality (2020, p. 9)—I show how each dimension lends itself to a particular pedagogical approach. Embodied and sensory-based learning facilitates the study of embodiment, place-based learning directs students’ attention towards materiality; affective learning strengthens their awareness of emotions; arts-based learning encourages their critical reflection about aesthetics; applied learning assists in their moral judgment; storytelling enables them to appreciate narrative structuring, and contemplative and integrative learning supports their study of spirituality.