Buddhism in the critical classroom

How do we deal with different cultural languages when teaching an Introduction to Buddhism course? A distinct religious vocabulary reveals itself during early assignments, where students freely deploy terms like “sin,” “atheism,” “afterlife,” and others in their discussions, associating sin with negative karmic action, atheism to their perception of Buddhism as a “godless” religion, the afterlife in reference to rebirth, and so forth. How do these “cultural languages” or “religious language” inform our pedagogical strategies in the classroom. Is cultural familiarity something to be broken immediately and displaced by new concepts and perspectives? Is it to be leveraged as devices for easy onboarding to other, more unfamiliar terms and ideas? Are they to be outright ignored? To discuss this, David Robertson is joined by Matthew Hayes from UCLA for a wide-ranging and open discussion.