With Guest Richard Jaffe

About this episode

Richard Jaffe discusses his experiences and research in Japanese Buddhism and Soto Zen.

Richard Jaffe was a student at the San Francisco Zen Center for years. He went on to become a leading Buddhist scholar who has spent a lot of time in Japan and knows Buddhism and especially Soto Zen there thoroughly in Japanese. He’s a professor of religion at Duke University retiring this or next year. His first book was Neither Monk nor Layman: Clerical Marriage in Modern Japanese Buddhism followed by collections of the writings of D.T. Suzuki. On Duke’s site it says: Richard Jaffe specializes in the study of Buddhism in early modern and modern Japan. In particular he has focused his research and teaching on the transformations that took place in Japanese Buddhist practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jaffe's current research centers on the role of D.T. Suzuki in the globalization of Japanese Buddhism in the twentieth century. He also has questions for me later on in this podcast,

People in this episode

Host: David Chadwick

Guest: Richard Jaffe

Topics covered

• Buddhism
• Soto Zen
• Japanese Buddhism
• D.T. Suzuki
• religion
• scholarship

Keywords

• Buddhism
• Soto Zen
• D.T. Suzuki
• Japanese culture
• religion
• scholarship
• Duke University

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: San Francisco Zen Center, Duke University

Books & works: Neither Monk nor Layman: Clerical Marriage in Modern Japanese Buddhism