The Interactive Lotus Sūtra
Project
Tentative Proposal
Jamie Hubbard, Smith College
Proposal
The purpose of this course is to teach Mahāyāna Buddhism through the vehicle of an
important Buddhist scripture, the Lotus Sūtra. The Interactive Lotus
Sūtra Project will produce a web site and CD-ROM containing all
of the materials necessary for an in-depth exploration of the Lotus
Sūtra at several different levels of expertise, from that of a beginner
first encountering the text through the professional scholar of Buddhism looking
at the text in original languages; the user will be able to freely switch among
the materials and choose his or her own level of complexity. A primary goal of
this project is that The Interactive Lotus Sūtra Project provide the content of an entire semester course suitable for college and
university courses introducing Mahāyāna Buddhist thought, practice, ritual,
culture, texts, and art; these materials will include the full text of
the Lotus Sūtra in English, Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan with
critical apparatus, articles by leading scholars, slide images of art and
architecture, video presentations of ritual and community activities, a
full range of teaching aids, including notes, paper topics, discussion
questions, and the like, and a variety of interactive tools for both students
and scholars to navigate and work with the materials according to their
needs. All of the material will by completely indexed, linked, and tagged
with the TEI subset of the SGML in order to facilitate scholarly research.
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Background: the
curricular model
This project arises from a panel organized by Peter Gregory and
presented at the American Academy of Religion in 1992. The panel showed how the Lotus Sūtra could
be used as a vehicle for presenting a thematically-organized course surveying
the history of Buddhism from its origins in India some 2500 years ago,
through its development in China, to its expression in contemporary Japan.
The Lotus Sūtra is an important example of an early Indian Mahāyāna
scripture that is still is one of the most popular and influential texts
in all of East Asian Buddhism, making it ideally suited to such a curricular
purpose. It offers an excellent window through which to view the rise of
Mahāyāna within the context of Indian Buddhism as well as the process of
cultural accommodation that took place as its ideas were continually reinterpreted
by East Asian Buddhists to make its message relevant for their own time
and religious situation. The various traditions, practices, and beliefs
associated with the Lotus in India, China, and Japan cover a wide
range of religious phenomena, including cultic practices centered around
the stūpa, the scripture as a sacred object, and relics; major doctrinal
ideas such as the eternality of the Buddha, the One Vehicle, and emptiness;
hermeneutical strategies such as expedient means, the use of parables,
and doctrinal classification; sophisticated theological systems as developed
by Chinese T'ien-t'ai and Japanese Tendai; complex ritual regimens exemplified
by Chih-i's four kinds of samādhi; folk belief and practice revealed in
various miraculous tales; the revelation of scripture in history; modern
mass lay movements; artistic representation; institutional considerations,
and more. The Lotus thus provides a means for sampling a broad spectrum
of religious phenomena cutting across such dichotomies as "popular" and
"elite" or "high" and "low." It also raises broad issues for the study
of religion, such as the importance of scripture as a source of popular inspiration,
as a repository of doctrine, as an authority on which different
sectarian traditions legitimated their claims, and as a sacred object in
its own right.
At the American Academy of Religion
panel, organized by Dr. Peter Gregory (University of Illinois), the basic
structure and rationale for such a course was presented together with eight
specific topics or modules that might make up such a course (two sample
teaching modules are listed below), each put together by a scholar well
recognized for their research and scholarship in this area. The panel was
enthusiastically received, and a number of participants subsequently taught
a course based on this curricular model. It was felt by many that a textbook
based on these materials would be an outstanding contribution to our field.
This project is an outgrowth of that panel.
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Background: interactive
multimedia courseware
The Interactive Lotus Sūtra
Projectwas begun when Smith College successfully submitted a proposal
to the Gladys Brooks Foundation to help establish a Humanities Computing
Resource Center, with the specific goal of funding humanities faculty initiatives
to develop our technology-supported curriculum in line with the vision
and demands of undergraduate teaching in a liberal arts environment. Professor
Jamie Hubbard, Yehan Numata Lecturer in Buddhist Studies, collaborated in
this grant with his idea of using the materials from the Lotus Sūtra
course project as the basis for a multimedia "book" that would add to the
original model the benefits of the interactive learning environment: instant,
random access to a vast trove of interrelated materials, integration in one
"site" of text, visual materials, sound recordings and video, and, perhaps most
interesting from the educational point of view, the interactive learning medium
that allows a student to "mingle" with the course material in ways hitherto
unimaginable due to the high cost or inaccessibility of materials. The $96,000
Gladys Brooks grant provided the initial hardware used to implement The
Interactive Lotus Sūtra Project but further
funds are required to free faculty time and to pay for materials acquisition.
To quote from the grant proposal, "Exactly how education, and in particular
education in the humanities, will be transformed when every image ever
rendered can be digitized and every word ever written can be transmitted
in seconds by sattelite and delivered on beams of light is still to be
determined." It is our hope that tThe Interactive Lotus Sūtra Project
will be a part of answering this question at the same time that it provides
a traditionally solid basis for understanding a particular area of study.
It is planned that the project
will be finished within two years, and in distribution
shortly after. Many of the materials have already been
gathered and input into the computer, a task that will continue throughout
the life of the project. If the necessary funding is secured it is estimated
that the actual design work can begin by late spring 2005.
Partners
in Education
The creation of high-quality courseware
requires the cooperation of a number of different talents, an approach
that is perhaps closer to the way that film or video is produced than traditional
book publishing. This particular project seems a model of this sort of
cooperation, involving the best of all possible worlds:
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Smith College has committed
itself to the education of young women who will be living and working in
the next millennium, and so has systematically worked to bring innovative
teaching applications into the classroom at the same time that we have
dramatically extended our students' reach beyond both the physical limits
of our campus and the traditional Western curriculum. The Smith College
Center for Foreign Languages and Cultures has distinguished itself nationally
in the development of innovative applications of computer technologies
in the teaching of foreign languages, and the college committed
$2.5 million to complete a campus-wide fibre optics information network.
Smith College has also long been a supporter of Asian studies, and in particular
has fostered the study of Asian religious traditions (with three members
of the faculty devoted full time to teaching aspects of the Buddhist tradition
its strength rivals that of many universities).
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Scholar's Press, the publishing
house of the American Academy of Religion, is internationally recognized
as one of the most prestigious publishers of outstanding quality work in
the field of religious studies. Over the years much if not most of the
electronic work in the field of religious studies has been presented at
the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical
Literature, and recently Scholar's Press has committed itself to the field
of electronic publishing. Under the leadership of Dr. Lewis Lancaster (University
of California-Berkeley) they have already been able to achieve a milestone
in publishing history with the publication of the Mahidohl Pali Canon
CD-ROM, consisting of the entire corpus of Pali Buddhist scriptures,
a feat that was closely followed by the publication of the Shinto Dictionary,
a multimedia database of Shinto practice, customs, and history. With their
reputation and distribution networks the wide use of the Lotus Sūtra
CD-ROM is assured, and the guidance of Lew Lancaster and the Electronic
Publishing Committee will help to ensure that the final product adheres
to the highest possible standards. Jamie Hubbard serves on the Electronic
Publishing Committee and also on the AAR's New Technologies Task Force.
We also hope that the experience and expertise of Scholar's Press in copyright
issues will help us to acquire much of the material free or at a nominal
charge.
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Kōsei Publishing
is internationally recognized for its support of the finest academic scholarship
on the Lotus Sūtra; their publications in this area (such as Art
of the Lotus Sūtra, Buddhism for Today: A Modern Interpretation of the
Threefold Lotus Sutra) have in many ways defined the field. We hope
that an active partnership can be forged to help to realize the project.
Although this project is not primarily aimed at the scholarly researcher,
the inclusion of primary texts, translations, and commentary owned or developed
by Kōsei Publishing could easily give the project a wider appeal and make
it an important tool for scholars, students, and practitioners as well
as the general reader.
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The Writers who will develop
the actual modules of the Lotus Sūtra CD-ROM represent the leaders
in the field of Buddhist Studies in the United States; in addition to the
original contributors to the AAR panel, other scholars will be consulted
as the project takes shape and the actual contents are refined. The original
contributors are:
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Panel Organizer, Professor Peter
Gregory, Smith College
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The Lotus Sūtra in India,
Professor Louis Gomez, University of Michigan
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The Lotus Sūtra in China,
Professor Daniel Stevenson, University of Kansas
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Avalokiteśvara and the Lotus Sūtra, Professor Chung-fan
Yu, Rutgers University
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The Art of the Lotus Sūtra,
Professor Willa Jane Tanabe, University of Hawaii
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The Lotus Sūtra in Early Japanese
Buddhism, Professor Paul Groner, University of Virginia
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Interpretations of the Lotus
Sūtra in Heian Culture, Professor William E. Deal, Case Western Reserve
University
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Nichiren and the Spirit of the
Lotus Sūtra, Professor Jacqueline Stone, Princeton University
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The Lotus Sutra and Japanese
New Religious Movements, Professor Helen Hardacre, Harvard University