Teaching Compassionate Listening in a Religious Conflict Course at a Buddhism-affiliated University in Taiwan

Classically, liberal theory presumes that religion is prone to conflict and violence. Liberal thinkers such as John Locke witnessed the religious violence between Catholics and Protestants in their own lives. Locke devised the separation of church and state to mitigate the presumed potential for conflict and violence that religious pluralism possessed. However, in other historical and cultural contexts, Christian denomination—such as the Quakers and Jehova’s Witnesses—and teachings that religious studies scholars later classified as religions such as Jainism and Buddhism claimed extreme forms of nonviolence. Buddhists have been particularly successful in portraying the Buddhist Dharma as a nonviolent religion. As a result, some high profile scholars attempt to debunk the popular nonviolent image of Buddhism (Sharf 1995, Victoria 2018). While scholarship aiming to correct biases in the academic literature is important, in the classroom, scholarship that seeks to identify the violence tendencies of Buddhism, “New Religions,” cults, or other teachings also serves to invoke stereotypes of religion as violent, irrational, or superstitious. This paper presents the teaching methods of a class on Religious Conflict at a comprehensive private university operated by a Buddhist organization in Taiwan. In the course curriculum, I both introduce the scholarship on religious violence in general, and Buddhist violence in particular, but also employ active learning pedagogy in the form of the Compassionate Listening Project curriculum (Knudsen Hoffman, Monroe, and Green 2012) to provide both examples of Buddhist nonviolence, and opportunities for preemptive conflict resolution.

The Religious Conflict class is offered as a master’s level course in a religious studies department. While the university does not require any religion classes for the general student body, and, with the exception of religious studies, no departments require religious studies or Buddhist studies curriculum. However, as a Buddhism-affiliated university, the university, and the religious studies program in particular, attracts many Buddhist renunciates, as well as many lay students with a background sympathetic to Buddhism, Daoism, and other Asian teachings. While some students are interested in the program for career credentials, many others are primarily interested in gaining a deeper knowledge of the teachings that they personally practice. As with any university, students are best served when what they learn is applicable to their own lives, but student practitioners are particularly interested in how they may apply what they learn to their personal lives.

The Religious Conflict course includes theory of religious conflict and classic essays on Buddhism and violence, but also the Compassionate Listening Project program. The Compassionate Listening Project is a public curriculum developed by Gene Knudsen Hoffman and other peacebuilding activists, such as Leah Green and Carol Hwoschinsky. Knudsen Hoffman, a Quaker, studied with the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Both Nhat Hanh and Knudsen Hoffman developed the program by visiting war zones such as the Israel/Palestine region, and practicing and teaching the expression of compassion by listening to one’s enemies. The curriculum is composed of various listening activities that ask participants to consider how they may oppress others at the same time that it asks them to listen to the suffering of others, including listening to both sides of a conflict in which the participant is not involved personally, as well as listening to one’s own perceived enemies. Knudsen Hoffman herself is a Quaker, and Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist. Many others that facilitate or endorse the program identify with other religious traditions, so the curriculum is designed to be open to all people. Yet, it is also aligned with Nhat Hanh’s teachings of compassionate communication and peacebuilding, so I teach it alongside some of Nhat Hanh’s explicitly Buddhist writings. Nhat Hanh’s involvement in compassionate listening draws the interest of students with Buddhist identities or sympathies, and provides a counterbalance to the course content on examples of religious and Buddhist violence.

By teaching peacebuilding as part of a Religious Conflict course, the curriculum identifies how Buddhists, Quakers, and other communities that are often identified as “religious” build peace, but it also builds on pedagogical techniques such as Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (Freire 2018) and Stephen Karpman’s “Drama Triangle ” (Karpman 1968). Rather than simply studying conflict theory, it allows students to identify conflict in or adjacent to their own lives, and provides practical ways for dealing with personal conflict as well as ways to engage in global activism.

The Compassionate Listening Project curriculum is publically available, and encompasses several decades of refinement through public courses. While the curriculum itself is not new, the novel approach that I propose to present brings it to a religious studies classroom, as an intervention in the pedagogy of Religious Conflict in the context of a Buddhism-affiliated religious studies program. I am offering the course for the first time in the spring of 2024, so the results will be fresh for the November AAR conference, and the results of this case study will inform how similar approaches may be employed in a North American context.  

Works Cited

Freire, Paulo, Myra Bergman Ramos, Donaldo P. Macedo, and Ira Shor. 2018. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 50th anniversary ed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Karpman, Stephen. 1968. "Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis." Transactional Analysis Bulletin 7 (26):39-43.

Knudsen Hoffman, Gene, Cynthia Monroe, and Leah Green. 2012. Compassionate Listening: An Exploratory Sourcebook About Conflict Transformation: www.newconversations.net.

Sharf, Robert H. 1995. "The Zen of Japanese Nationalism." In Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism, edited by Donald S. Lopez, 107-160. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Victoria, Brian Daizen. 2018. Zen at War. Second edition ed. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.