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William
R. LaFleur
E. Dale Saunders
Professor in Japanese Studies
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A.B. Calvin College
MA. University of Michigan, Comparative Literature
MA and Ph.D. University of Chicago, History of
Religions/East Asian Studies
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Research
Interests:
My research
has tended to get specific in three areas—held together,
I hope, under the larger tent of “Buddhism and Culture
in Japan.” The first of these consisted of
studies of how Buddhism shaped the mind of medieval Japan
and my specific foci were Saigyô, a monk-poet of
the 12th century and Dôgen, a Zen master and thinker
of the 13th. I later turned to questions related to how
abortion was accommodated within Japanese Buddhism in
the Edo and modern periods; from there I have more recently
worked on bioethics in contemporary Japan, specifically
how Japan’s religions and philosophies formulate
questions and answers differently than in the United States.
Selected Publications:
The Karma
of Words: Buddhism and the Literature Arts in Medieval
Japan (University of California Press, 1986), Liquid
Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan (Princeton
University Press, 1992). I edited Zen and Western
Thought: Essays by Masao Abe (1985), recipient of
an American Acaemy of Religion prize; Dôgen
Studies 1985), both books published by the University
of Hawaii Press; co-edited Practicing the Afterlife:
Perspectives from Japan (Austrian Academy of Sciences,
2004 and in 2003 published Awesome Nightfall: The
Life, Death, and Poetry of Saigyô (Wisdom
Publ.) An edited volume, Dark Medicine: Rationalizing
Unethical Medical Research in Germany, Japan, and the
United States will be published by Indiana UP in
2006. Among other publications “Hungry Ghosts
and Hungry People: Somaticity and Rationality in Medieval
Japan” has been a quite widely noted essay. Works
have been translated into Russian, German, and Japanese.
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Prizes/Awards/Fellowships:
First non-Japanese
recipient of the Watsuji Tetsurô Culture Prize
for scholarship; Fellowships from the Japan Foundation,
the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation,
the Center for European Integration Studies, the Social
Science Research Council, the Korean Research Council
among others; Elected as a Senior Fellow at Penn’s
Center for Bioethics |
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Courses:
EALC 063
(Medicine, Culture and Bioethics in Japan); EALC 005
(Worlds Apart: The Cultural Construction of “East”
and “West”); EALC (160/560 Introduction
to Japanese Thought); EALC 265 (Zen Buddhism); EALC
269 (Japanese Buddhism); EALC 771 (Current Japanology).
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