Global Humanities & Religions' Ethan Bushelle publishes new essay

Western Washington University Assistant Professor of Global Humanities & Religions Ethan Bushelle's essay "The Green Bamboo is the Dharmakāya: Waka Poetry and the Buddhist Imagination in Heian Japan" is one of the entries in a volume of essays, "Buddhist Literature as Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy as Literature" recently published by SUNY Press. 

"The Green Bamboo is the Dharmakāya" considers two decisive transformations in the place and understanding of Japanese court poetry, or waka, in Japan's Heian period (794–1185): the first, an "embedding" of waka poetry in Buddhist ritual in the tenth century and, the second, its "contemplative disembedding" in the twelfth. Both transformations redefined waka's role in the configuration and articulation of a Buddhist understanding of the natural world.