Dr. Kenneth W. Holloway
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Levenson Professor of Japanese History
Areas of Expertise
The history of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism
Email:
khollow4@fau.edu
Office Phone: (561) 297-2684
The focus of my research is traditional Asian religion and philosophy, specifically the humanism of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. Buddhism has been deeply interconnected with Daoism, and Confucianism for more than a thousand years but the study of this has focused on commentary and exegesis with little work being done on close readings of canonical sources. My approach is to analyze the rhetoric and the use of dialogues in these texts as a new avenue for understanding the practitioner’s embodied experience. As such, my work is both focused on individual religious experience, but it is not rooted in a specific time or place. These canonical sources have been read continuously across all of East Asia for over one thousand years.
The first phase of my research was to use recently excavated Guodian manuscripts dating from 300 BCE to challenge long-standing views of Confucianism and Daoism as fundamentally separate traditions. These texts see self-cultivation as a transformative experience where the body of each individual is the focus, which is in contrast to emphasizing family, society, or a ruler. My research on this humanism can be found in two monographs published by Oxford University Press, Guodian: The Newly Discovered Seeds of Chinese Religious and Political Philosophy (2009) and The Quest for Ecstatic Morality in Early China (2013).
Having established a new theory for reading early texts, I discovered important common ground in the Vimalakirti Sutra. This sutra in particular, and Buddhism in general, is often seen as focusing on debates between Mahayana and Hinayana, which makes it difficult to appreciate its humanistic side. In response to this I published an edited volume Buddhism and the Body (Brill 2023) to bring together scholarship that uses somaesthetics to better understand the religion from the perspective of the practitioner. This book is makes equal contributions to research on Buddhism in China and Japan.
Courses
- Zen and Buddhism
- History of Eastern Ideas
- Women in Asian History
- History of Modern Japan
- History of Modern China
- History of East Asia