How do you communicate with the buddhas? How do you ensure your own enlightenment and bring benefit to your loved ones? This summer Heather Blair will be exploring these questions through research on the social and literary history of eleventh-century prayer-texts (ganmon) from Japan. She will enjoy the assistance of graduate students Yiwen Zhang (East Asian Languages and Literatures), Joseph Decker (Religious Studies), and Jason Smith (Religious Studies); the team’s work is supported by IU’s Presidential Arts and Humanities Program. In the fall, Blair will begin writing a history of the ganmon genre based on literary translation, research for which she has received a grant from the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies.
The College of Arts