Keeping It All in Balance: Teaching Asian Religions through Illness and Healing

Abstract

Abstract Initially, my fascination with teaching a course on illness and healing in Asian religions grew out of my experience of working with undergraduate students in religious studies and the sciences at Harvard University who wanted to learn about the cultural beliefs and customs of Asia in unconventional ways, crossing disciplinary boundaries and creating a net of interconnections between various fields like religious studies, medicine, anthropology, and sociology. Intersecting with my own doctoral work at the time on illness and renunciation in Tibetan Buddhist biographies, I was thrown into a search for what I saw as an exciting field of inquiry—illness, healing, and religion. I found that these themes appear throughout a number of traditions within Asia, have an overarching human element that crosses cultural boundaries, and have historical and current-day prominence. Thereafter, teaching several courses on the topic as junior tutorials at the same university and as undergraduate courses at two liberal arts colleges helped me consider large pedagogical questions: How do I teach an engaging yet informative introductory course on Asian religions year after year? How do the lenses of illness and healing help students understand Asian religious traditions? How do I engage responsibly in comparative and interdisciplinary studies? This essay discusses how the journey of teaching a course on illness and healing in selected religious traditions of India, Tibet, and China from a large urban setting to smaller isolated liberal arts colleges led to several revelations.