Feature Articles
Authors: Chaya Chandrasekhar , Ihor Pidhainy
Keywords: China, China and Inner Asia, Experiential Learning, Japan, Northeast Asia, Philosophy, Religion, South Asia, Tibet, United States
How to Cite: Chandrasekhar, C. & Pidhainy, I. (2014) “New York City as Classroom: Exploring Buddhism Through Experiential Learning”, Education About Asia. 19(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.65959/eaa.1240
Experiential learning can be particularly useful when teaching about Asia, as few students in an introductory course come with much knowledge about the region’s vast history, distinct cultures, and complicated political and social structures. Nevertheless, how does an instructor provide students direct experience of Asia without planning expensive study abroad opportunities or site visits? How does an educator encourage engagement with Asia without relying entirely on guest speakers or informational films shown in the classroom? This essay recounts an experiential learning component offered at Marietta College, a liberal arts college in the Midwest, that focused on Asian religion. Specifically, it addresses how a learning community of students explored Buddhist history, art, and practice through a four-day study excursion to New York City in spring 2013.
Many colleges today offer learning communities as a way to introduce freshmen students to the institution and help them build an intellectual community. (note 1) In a learning community, a group of students takes two or more related courses together. These courses are typically interdisciplinary with a common theme or are designed so that one course trains students within a discipline, while the other provides foundational skills like written or verbal communication. The aim of a learning community is to build camaraderie and foster peer learning. (note 2)
Marietta College recently established an Asian Studies program. This interdisciplinary program includes both a major and minor and requires coursework in language and literature, history, and art history, with electives available in international business, leadership, and music. Offering a learning community with an Asia focus appeared to be an effective way to publicize the new program and build student interest.
The learning community was first offered in spring 2011 and repeated more recently in 2013. Each time, the community took the study of Buddhism as its focus. A group of students signed up for two classes: a history course, which addressed the history and practices of the religion; and an art history course, which explored Buddhism’s rich visual tradition. The history course began with the origins of Buddhism in its South Asian context and traced its development as it spread to the Himalayan regions and to Central and East Asia. Topics examined included the foundational principles and ethics of Buddhism, the religion’s divergence into major branches, the complexities of sectarian divisions, and the multiplication of schools both within South Asia and beyond. The class also explored devotional aspects of Buddhism and other forms of religious practice. The art history course emphasized the role that the visual arts have played since the earliest days of the religion and how they continue to do so today. As a major focus of the art history course, students examined Buddhist architecture, sculpture, painting, and ritual implements to understand how art and material culture express the complex philosophies and highest aspirations of the tradition. Students learned to read and decode visual imagery and analyze the ways in which art communicates Buddhist methods and goals of attainment. Much like the history course, the art history class traced the development of Buddhist art in India and examined, as the religion traversed Asia, the ways in which the visual tradition shifted to accommodate new practices and local tastes.
Covering a similar timeframe and geographical area, both classes worked in tandem to provide students with a more comprehensive understanding of Buddhism. Traditionally, the study of the religion focuses on Buddhist literature and textual sources. Buddhist art additionally can be read as visual texts, and Buddhist visual culture frequently provides information not easily accessible in religious literature. 3 The two courses therefore provided students the opportunity to simultaneously engage both the literary and visual aspects of the religion and explore how each informs the other.
The learning community’s demographic included a wide range of students. The majority was strongly rooted in the arts and humanities, but there were also students who majored in business and economics, finance, computer science, and engineering. Although the diverse disciplinary training that students brought to the learning community enriched the classes, the range of student backgrounds also posed certain challenges for the two courses. The art history class instructor faced the difficulty of balancing the work between students with a more advanced understanding of the visual arts with those that were newcomers to the field who had to be trained in visual vocabulary, visual analyses, and effectively integrating visual study with historical information. For the history course, similarly, there were students who felt comfortable with writing papers in the humanities and those who struggled with textual analyses and writing to the requirements of the discipline.
An additional issue arose with the divide between the Asian Studies majors—several of whom had taken at least two or more courses on Asia, had some language training, and had studied abroad in China—with those students who had little to no knowledge of Asia. The classes also included students from China, some of whom were practicing Buddhists. Because of their familiarity, the Asian Studies majors and the international students tended to grasp cultural nuances and contextualized Buddhist practices more easily than those unfamiliar with the study of Asia. For example, the importance of filial piety in the Chinese tradition and the need for Buddhism to accommodate this belief were clear to students who had completed courses on East Asia, but for others, why Buddhist monks cut their hair as part of practice, bared their shoulders, or remained unmarried required further discussion.4 Such instances provided rich opportunity for peer-to-peer learning in the classroom. Eager to share their experiences, students with backgrounds in Asia would take the lead in attempting to explain concepts and ideas to their classmates. Time and again, moments of confusion over Asia and Asian religions transformed into animated class discussion. For the instructors, such moments presented openings to discuss the complexity of Asian societies and civilizations, encouraging students to move beyond approaching Asia in monolithic terms.
The myriad practices of Buddhism particularly puzzled students, whether they were familiar with Asia or otherwise. The two classes emphasized the predominance of temples, rituals, meditation, and devotion in Buddhism while discussing how images play a significant role in ritual performances and in defining sacred space. Even students who had visited Asia frequently raised questions about regional or sectarian variances in art and practice methodologies. For example, students asked about the relationship of a stupa, or pagoda architecture, to mandalas, ritual diagrams, or comparisons between Vajrayana practice in Nepal and Tibet to the Shingon esoteric tradition in Japan. The Judeo- Christian backgrounds of the majority of students in the courses left them confused about what it meant to be a practicing Buddhist. They held to different views on ritual obligations, devotional commitments, and religious imagery and iconography. This pointed to the significance of including an experiential learning component to the course to introduce to students firsthand these aspects of the tradition.
Nevertheless, providing students in North American colleges, universities, and high schools direct access to the varied Buddhist practices can be challenging. Although travel to Asia would be the most effective manner in which to provide experiential learning, it is frequently too expensive and requires time beyond what a semester-long course typically allows.5 It is possible to bring outside practitioners into the classroom to speak to students or demonstrate a ritual. However, this does not convey the sense of community and sacred space that is so integral to Buddhist ritual and practice. Schools in major urban centers are within easy reach of Buddhist temples, museums with Buddhist art and material culture collections, and meditation centers that may be visited for instructional purposes outside the classroom. In other parts of North America, however, access to nearby centers is scarce. To allow students the richest possible direct experience, when the Buddhism learning community was first offered in 2011, the course piloted a trip to Washington, DC. The two-day study trip included visits to a Buddhist temple in Fairfax, Virginia, and the Buddhist art collections at the Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art, part of the Smithsonian Museums. After their time in Washington, DC, students in the learning community remarked favorably about the trip in the short field reports that they wrote as part of a class assignment and on the course evaluations at the end of the semester. The deeper understanding that the students obtained from the visits to the temple and museums produced better results on tests and other forms of learning assessments in the courses. The positive response to the experiential component in the pilot course encouraged the instructors to build on it when the Buddhism learning community was offered again. In spring 2013, the class extended the experiential learning opportunity to a four-day trip to New York City.Eager to share their experiences, students with backgrounds in Asia would take the lead in attempting to explain concepts and ideas to their classmates.
Manhattan contains some of the best Asian art museums and cultural institutions in the US. The Rubin Museum and the Metropolitan Museum offer world-class collections of Buddhist art.6 At the Rubin, students were struck by not only the outstanding displays, but also the story of the long history of private collection and benefaction of Buddhist artwork.7 The Metropolitan Museum allowed students to observe and experience up-close works of art they had studied in class and read about in their textbook. For the instructors, the enthusiastic discussions between students as they analyzed an object, directly applying course content, were particularly rewarding. Art and cultural institutions like the Tibet House and the Asia Society provide unique opportunities for studying Asia in New York City.8 The Tibet House, established at the request of the Dalai Lama to raise awareness about Tibet and its culture heritage, presented opportunities for students to explore Buddhist politics and activism. Students spoke at length with the director, Mr. Ganden Thurman, who introduced them to the Tibet House’s repatriation program, which preserves Tibetan cultural artifacts. Students also had the chance to examine firsthand a Tibetan Buddhist shrine lit with butter lamps and festooned with votive silk banners. Additionally, they examined a hand-constructed, three-dimensional mandala and viewed an exhibit of contemporary Buddhist art.Aside from the art and religious institutions, Manhattan provides opportunities to introduce students to various other aspects of Asian culture.
