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Miriam Levering

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Miriam Levering has been a Visiting Scholar at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University for 2005-2006. She is working on a translation of a Chinese collection of letters that in Korea is one of the four most important guides to Zen meditation and Zen thought, The Letters of Dahui Zonggao. In connection with her interest in the cultural effects of Buddhism in America, she has this year published articles on the "Remembering Hiroshima in Oak Ridge, TN" (about scientist Dr. Alvin Weinberg and the "Buddhist Bell" that became the Oak Ridge International Friendship Bell) and "Jack Kerouac as a Buddhist Author." She has given three lectures on the Chan Buddhist school's significant contributions to the lore of the Bodhisattva of Compassion (called Guanyin, also spelled Kuan Yin, in Chinese and Avalokitesvara in Sanskrit)in China. Two of these lectures were given at Harvard University, and one was given as a paper given at an international conference on Guanyin at Dharma Drum University in Taiwan. She continues to be interested in making available in English knowledge about and sermons and poems by women Chan and Zen masters in Asia. With Prof. Beata Grant of Washington University in St. Louis, she is also working on a translation into English of 135 poems by three important Chan Buddhist nuns in China. Miriam has also recently given two invited lectures at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY on the thought of her teacher Wilfred Cantwell Smith. One was entitled: "My Wife Says I am Prejudiced against Anthropologists: Doing Religious Studies under the Gaze of Wilfred Smith." The other was entitled: "Wilfred Cantwell Smith and the Study of Scripture as a Category in the Comparative Study of Religion."

Fields of Interest

  • Religion in China
  • Zen Buddhism
  • Women in Religion
  • Japanese Religions
  • Chinese

Current Courses

  • Dr. Levering is not teaching any courses this Spring.
Miriam Levering

Contact Information

Miriam Levering
Professor
504 McClung Tower
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-0450

Phone: 865-974-6979
Email: mleverin@utk.edu