Playing to Lose: Fun and Games in Buddhist Thought, Practice, and Pedagogy

This roundtable was prompted by conversation following a generative session on Buddhism and labor at the 2025 annual meeting of the AAR. It seeks to explore one domain that might lie on the other side of Buddhist labor—that is, Buddhist play—using methods well-suited to this material: conversation but also imagination, performance, and games. Following philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s (2020) assertion that games allow us to record and transmit forms of agency, participants will take up play as a metaphor for enlightenment, a means of rehearsing enlightenment, and as a technology for producing and reproducing Buddhist subjectivities, whether fleetingly or enduringly. Bringing to bear a wide set of interdisciplinary methods and teaching experiences, the speakers on the roundtable will share both scholarly reflection on play as practice in Chinese and Japanese Buddhism and concrete strategies for devising and developing games and adding play-based content to one’s teaching.