Meet the Faculty

Richard Nance

• Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies

Education

• Ph.D. at University of Chicago, 2004

Contact Information

Background

• Luce Dissertation Fellowship, Divinity School, University of Chicago
• Individual Research Grant, Committee on Southern Asian Studies, University of Chicago
• Summer Language Fellowship, University of Virginia

I am a specialist in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism; my work to date has focused broadly on Buddhism in India as practiced during the first millennium. I am interested in the ways in which doctrines inform, and are informed by, practices—more specifically, in questions of how protocols for teaching, learning, and interpreting Buddhist texts have shifted over time as these protocols have themselves been taught, learned, and interpreted.

My work draws its methods and concerns from at least three distinct academic disciplines: history, philosophy, and philology. It is historical, insofar as it does not attempt to provide an encompassing account of what a de-historicized “Buddhist tradition” says. Rather, it focuses more narrowly on particular times and places, to the extent that this is possible, and aims to offer a descriptive account of the normative assumptions that were influential in those times and places. My work is also philosophical, insofar as it rationally reconstructs these normative assumptions to show the ways in which they have provided—and can continue to provide—resources for sustained reflection on some of the guiding questions of philosophy. Finally, my work is philological, insofar as it excavates these assumptions via close inspection of primary sources in Sanskrit and Classical Tibetan, attending to the ways that processes of textual transmission in pre-print culture can serve to shape received texts. 

Recent and current projects include studies of: accounts of reasoning (yukti) articulated by Indian Buddhist scholastics; the figure of the preacher in Indian Buddhist history and literature; issues of coherence raised by the intersection of Buddhist epistemology and Buddhist exegesis; the divergent stances taken by Buddhists in India and Tibet toward the practice of lying in the service of propagating Buddhist teaching; and the composition of guides designed to provide instruction for would-be commentators on how best to articulate the meaning of scriptural texts.

Research Interests

• Indian and Tibetan Buddhism
• Commentarial Rhetoric and Practice
• Buddhist Philosophy in Comparative Perspective

Courses Recently Taught

• Introduction to Buddhism
• Buddhist Philosophy in India
  

Publication Highlights

"Indian Buddhist Preachers Inside and Outside the Sūtras,"
Blackwell Religion Compass (forthcoming).

"On What Do We Rely When We Rely on Reasoning?" Journal of Indian
Philosophy (April, 2007).

Review of Joseph Walser, Nāgārjuna in Context: Mahāyāna Buddhism and Early Indian Culture (Columbia University Press, 2005). H-BUDDHISM <http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=32871144160451>.