In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This paper investigates how the biography, work, and legacy of Dōgen 道元 (1200–1253), the supposed founder of the Japanese Sōtō Zen tradition, was manipulated in medieval esoteric transmission materials known as kirigami 切紙 or “cut paper slips.” Whereas much scholarship postulates a recovery of Dōgen’s lost importance during the Tokugawa period, and in the course of Sōtō sectarian reform, the paper argues that such recovery happened against a backdrop of constant, esoteric reinvention of the founder’s hagiography during the medieval period, a reinvention that, just as the supposed Tokugawa recovery, served concrete needs for legitimizing sectarian practices and doctrinal innovations in the face of a changing, and often hostile, religio-political landscape. In addition, it challenges perspectives that would argue for a simple continuity between medieval and early modern hermeneutical stances by demonstrating that Dōgen’s Tokugawa rebirths were effected by reinscribing the founder’s life and thought into a new epistemological regime.

Scholarship on Shinran hagiography tends to focus on the production of narrative accounts of the life of this Japanese Buddhist founder, while overlooking controversies and debates surrounding details of his life. This paper challenges that prioritization, arguing that such controversies are themselves moments of hagiographical production—key moments when a founder’s life is contested, reinterpreted, and mobilized in different ways. Focusing on an influential controversy from the eighteenth century surrounding the Tradition of the True Lineage of Saint Shinran (Shinran shōnin shōtōden, 1715), it examines how disputes over Shinran’s life reshaped both his image and sectarian authority within the Shin Buddhist community. Rather than relying on narrative storytelling, this mode of hagiographical construction unfolded through explicit argumentation and debates over historical authenticity. Analyzing key texts from Ryōkū and his critics, the paper demonstrates how such controversies actively shaped Shin Buddhist history and calls for a broader approach to hagiography.

Since the nineteenth and early twentieth century, biographers of Nichiren have not been limited to clerics and lay devotees, and Nichiren has not been represented exclusively as the founder of the Nichirenshū. However, most modern elaborations have premodern roots and therefore represent as much continuity as innovation. The life story of Nichiren has been elaborated in a wide range of literary, visual and performing arts genres, including hagiographies, novels, kabuki plays, paintings, and films. Following an overview of the premodern Nichiren images and hagiographies and their defining characteristics, this study explores how the accounts of Nichiren’s life were modified and amplified by nonclerical authors in modern Japan. It argues that for Japanese Buddhism, modernity entailed not only the demythologization of the founder’s image, but also its remythologization in a new manner, which served the needs of the narrators and their audiences. 

This paper investigates how the biography, work, and legacy of Dōgen 道元 (1200–1253), the supposed founder of the Japanese Sōtō Zen tradition, was manipulated in medieval esoteric transmission materials known as kirigami 切紙 or “cut paper slips.” Whereas much scholarship postulates a recovery of Dōgen’s lost importance during the Tokugawa period, and in the course of Sōtō sectarian reform, the paper argues that such recovery happened against a backdrop of constant, esoteric reinvention of the founder’s hagiography during the medieval period, a reinvention that, just as the supposed Tokugawa recovery, served concrete needs for legitimizing sectarian practices and doctrinal innovations in the face of a changing, and often hostile, religio-political landscape. In addition, it challenges perspectives that would argue for a simple continuity between medieval and early modern hermeneutical stances by demonstrating that Dōgen’s Tokugawa rebirths were effected by reinscribing the founder’s life and thought into a new epistemological regime.

Scholarship on Shinran hagiography tends to focus on the production of narrative accounts of the life of this Japanese Buddhist founder, while overlooking controversies and debates surrounding details of his life. This paper challenges that prioritization, arguing that such controversies are themselves moments of hagiographical production—key moments when a founder’s life is contested, reinterpreted, and mobilized in different ways. Focusing on an influential controversy from the eighteenth century surrounding the Tradition of the True Lineage of Saint Shinran (Shinran shōnin shōtōden, 1715), it examines how disputes over Shinran’s life reshaped both his image and sectarian authority within the Shin Buddhist community. Rather than relying on narrative storytelling, this mode of hagiographical construction unfolded through explicit argumentation and debates over historical authenticity. Analyzing key texts from Ryōkū and his critics, the paper demonstrates how such controversies actively shaped Shin Buddhist history and calls for a broader approach to hagiography.

Since the nineteenth and early twentieth century, biographers of Nichiren have not been limited to clerics and lay devotees, and Nichiren has not been represented exclusively as the founder of the Nichirenshū. However, most modern elaborations have premodern roots and therefore represent as much continuity as innovation. The life story of Nichiren has been elaborated in a wide range of literary, visual and performing arts genres, including hagiographies, novels, kabuki plays, paintings, and films. Following an overview of the premodern Nichiren images and hagiographies and their defining characteristics, this study explores how the accounts of Nichiren’s life were modified and amplified by nonclerical authors in modern Japan. It argues that for Japanese Buddhism, modernity entailed not only the demythologization of the founder’s image, but also its remythologization in a new manner, which served the needs of the narrators and their audiences. 

This paper investigates how the biography, work, and legacy of Dōgen 道元 (1200–1253), the supposed founder of the Japanese Sōtō Zen tradition, was manipulated in medieval esoteric transmission materials known as kirigami 切紙 or “cut paper slips.” Whereas much scholarship postulates a recovery of Dōgen’s lost importance during the Tokugawa period, and in the course of Sōtō sectarian reform, the paper argues that such recovery happened against a backdrop of constant, esoteric reinvention of the founder’s hagiography during the medieval period, a reinvention that, just as the supposed Tokugawa recovery, served concrete needs for legitimizing sectarian practices and doctrinal innovations in the face of a changing, and often hostile, religio-political landscape. In addition, it challenges perspectives that would argue for a simple continuity between medieval and early modern hermeneutical stances by demonstrating that Dōgen’s Tokugawa rebirths were effected by reinscribing the founder’s life and thought into a new epistemological regime.

Scholarship on Shinran hagiography tends to focus on the production of narrative accounts of the life of this Japanese Buddhist founder, while overlooking controversies and debates surrounding details of his life. This paper challenges that prioritization, arguing that such controversies are themselves moments of hagiographical production—key moments when a founder’s life is contested, reinterpreted, and mobilized in different ways. Focusing on an influential controversy from the eighteenth century surrounding the Tradition of the True Lineage of Saint Shinran (Shinran shōnin shōtōden, 1715), it examines how disputes over Shinran’s life reshaped both his image and sectarian authority within the Shin Buddhist community. Rather than relying on narrative storytelling, this mode of hagiographical construction unfolded through explicit argumentation and debates over historical authenticity. Analyzing key texts from Ryōkū and his critics, the paper demonstrates how such controversies actively shaped Shin Buddhist history and calls for a broader approach to hagiography.

Since the nineteenth and early twentieth century, biographers of Nichiren have not been limited to clerics and lay devotees, and Nichiren has not been represented exclusively as the founder of the Nichirenshū. However, most modern elaborations have premodern roots and therefore represent as much continuity as innovation. The life story of Nichiren has been elaborated in a wide range of literary, visual and performing arts genres, including hagiographies, novels, kabuki plays, paintings, and films. Following an overview of the premodern Nichiren images and hagiographies and their defining characteristics, this study explores how the accounts of Nichiren’s life were modified and amplified by nonclerical authors in modern Japan. It argues that for Japanese Buddhism, modernity entailed not only the demythologization of the founder’s image, but also its remythologization in a new manner, which served the needs of the narrators and their audiences. 

My paper explains how 4E Cognition can illuminate a Christian understanding of humans as the image of God. My paper has three parts. First, I situate recent scholarship in comparative psychology, which has argued that humans are unique due to a capacity for shared intentionality, within a 4E Cognition framework. Second, I show how, for Christians, the triune God may be conceived as an eternal act of shared intentionality, which the trinitarian persons eternally enact. Finally, I argue that humans are the image of God because of their capacity to dynamically couple with, and enact in humans, the shared intentionality with the divine.

4e cognition offers resources supporting an anthropology and an ontology that overcome mind/body and related dualisms, dualisms which contradict the original understandings of the Western monotheisms and of some Asian religions. 4e cognition  embraces a holism with respect to the human organism, enabling a rapprochement with the Hebrew biblical, New Testament, and Qur’anic view of the human being as a psycho-somatic unity. For 4e cognition, the human organism comes embedded or emplaced in an environment with affordances, as it enacts meaning in co-constituting its  lifeworld. The cruciality of social relationships and nature resonate with Western scriptures and with Mahayana Buddhism, Ruism/Confucianism, and Daoism. 4e cognition  extends the joint project of organism and environment to evolution, with a mutual adaptation or specification of organism and environment. The fit of organism and environment finds resonance with classical religions, insofar as they uphold the goodness of creation or of the world.

Religion can be studied within the paradigm of Scientific Worldview Studies. Worldviews address fundamental issues, enabling humans to make sense of their place in the larger scheme of things. Scientific Worldview Studies grounds this meaning-making in an evolutionary context, treating human worldviews as continuous with basic sense-making tasks all organisms engage in. Terror Management Theory (TMT) supports this meaning-making role of worldviews. While TMT treats worldviews within an evolutionary context, its explanatory framework of ‘the denial of death’ limits its scope and empirical support. Enactivism allows for a richer account of continuity between basic-level world-making and the socio-linguistic sophistication of religious worldviews. It argues that all organisms act in non-random ways to maintain functional integrity—this is autopoiesis. For social creatures, this process encompasses elements of the social environment, setting the stage for the symbolically encoded worldviews constructed by humans. This approach frames worldview construction as an extension of autopoietic processes. 

The connection between body-minds and their embedding in the environment is a primary concern of 4E cognition, nature religion movements, and environmentalism. Wiccan practice presents a unique opportunity to explore the intersection of these concerns through its centering of the connection of body-mind and nature. Two cognitive strategies found in Wicca will be examined: correspondence of embodiment and environmental embedding through the conceptual blend of nature deities, and practices of enactive sense-making in natural settings. In combination, these facilitate interpretative drift toward connection and identification with nature. This subsequently leads to an increased propensity toward environmentalist activity, another central tenet of Wiccan spiritual practice. Taken together, Wiccan practice not only offers fertile ground for the exploration of embodied, embedded, and enactive cognition in religious practices, but also how these may also intersect with environmentalist concerns.

This paper expands the scope of the cognitive science of meditation by applying an enactive approach to the goals of classical and contemporary Abrahamic contemplative traditions. Drawing on recent enactive accounts of Buddhist contemplative practices and paths, it argues that influential Jewish, Christian, and Islamic accounts conceive of the contemplative path as a transformation of the "emergent self"—a self that can be deconstructed but is ultimately reconstructed in ways that simultaneously enhance attunement with divine reality in creation and ethical action. Rather than advocating for the complete dissolution of selfhood, these traditions describe ultimate contemplative transformation as the realization of a dynamically coupled (resurrected) self and world.

This paper is an auto-ethnographic account of cultivating compassion through embodied ascetic Tibetan Buddhist practices performed during a fasting retreat called nyungne. It is an account from experiences during fieldwork at Tekcholing Nunnery in Boudhanath, Nepal 2023, where I gathered interviews and experiences of care, compassion, love, and confidence to understand how these moments are felt and experienced. This auto-ethnography contributes to the comparative conversation on embodied theology by showing how an ascetic contemplative practice may rely upon the physical body and circumvent rational, conceptual ideas gained from cultural, philosophical, or doctrine. In this way, we can see how other practitioners may also rely upon their own embodied knowledge in lieu of more conceptual knowledge acquisition.

This paper engages the 14th century anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing, particularly his “Letter of Privy Counseling,” and explores the role of affectivity in Christian contemplative practice in comparative perspective. While contextualizing the Cloud author within the “affective Dionysian” tradition of medieval mysticism and outlining the doctrinal and devotional elements of the practice he commends, the paper draws upon phenomenological resources to highlight the role of affectivity (or “auto-affection”) in grounding and sustaining contemplative transformation. Using phenomenology as a bridge, the paper sketches key points of comparison with Tibetan Buddhist practice traditions, particularly where the role of basic affect is concerned. The work of Tsoknyi Rinpoche, John Welwood, and John Makransky are especially informative of this move.

This paper develops for comparative theological work an understanding of the role played by affect in contemplative insight. It works out the role of affective “sensing,” or intimating, in the unfolding of contemplative insight, the way cultivating and remaining in a specific basic affect creates the conditions under which sudden contemplative insight can occur. It does so by examining instructions in the “preliminary practices” (sngon ’gro) of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition Dzogchen (rdzogs chen, “Great Completeness”). Dzogchen’s preliminary practices self-consciously cultivate intensive affective states, using them to evoke recognition of rig pa (“awareness”)—the simple, primordial, unconditioned ground of awareness. I suggest that, for Dzogchen commentators, there is a specific but utterly simple affect which uniquely intimates rig pa’s qualities: a felt sense of total safety released into expanse. I use Eugene Gendlin’s account of how implicit meanings are present to us as affects to understand this facet of Dzogchen.