My specialty is the study of Japan and much of my work deals with comparisons between Japan and the United States—especially in the areas of religion, public philosophy, and social ethics. Although much of my earlier work concentrated on Buddhism and the literary arts in medieval Japan, within more recent decades it has been comparative ethics and especially bioethics that have been the focus of my writing, teaching, and public lecturing. I currently am also a Senior Fellow at Penn’s Center for Bioethics and comment at times on these matters in the public media.
My undergraduate degree is from Calvin College. My MA degrees are in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan and in the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. My PhD is also from Chicago, where I studied primarily with Joseph Kitagawa and Mircea Eliade. My focus there was on Buddhism in Japan. I held positions at Princeton University and UCLA before joining the Penn faculty in 1990. Among my books are The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 1986); Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan (Princeton University Press, 1992); and Buddhism: A Cultural Perspective (Prentice-Hall, 1988). I edited Dôgen Studies and Zen and Western Thought: Essays by Masao Abe (both from the University of Hawaii Press). The latter book was recipient of the American Academy of Religion’s prize. In 1989 I was the first non-Japanese to be awarded the Watsuji Tetsurô Culture Prize. My books have also been published in Japanese, Russian and German.
Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania