Yale University
- February 19–25, 2018. University of California, Berkeley
Eric Greene (Ph.D. Berkeley, 2012) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale. He specializes in the history of medieval Chinese Buddhism. Much of his recent research has focused on Buddhist meditation practices, including the history of the transmission on Indian meditation practices to China, the development of distinctly Chinese forms of Buddhist meditation, and Buddhist rituals of confession and atonement. He is currently writing a book on the uses of meditative visionary experience as evidence of sanctity within early Chinese Buddhism. In addition to these topics, he has published articles on the early history of Chan (Zen), Buddhist paintings from the Silk Roads, the influence of modern psychological terminology on the Western interpretation of Buddhism, and Buddhist vegetarianism in China. He is also presently working on a long-term project on the translation practices of An Shigao, the first translator of Indian Buddhist texts into Chinese.
During his stay at UC Berkeley, he presented a lecture titled, “From chan to Chan: meditation and the semiotics of visionary experience in medieval Chinese Buddhism”, and four seminars.