Anne C. Klein
Professor of Religious Studies, Rice University
Founding Director, Dawn Mountain
Tel.
713.348.2711
e-mail: ack@rice.edu
“Buddhism is gaining a larger following in the West because there is hunger for community, for rituals and for precisely articulated practices of stillness, love and opening. These are not things that our secularized culture has really been called on to provide. Buddhism provides them, and does so in a way that does not threaten a person’s religion of origin. In Asia, it is the norm to participate in multiple religious traditions. The modern West’s inclination to find this astonishing or impossible is, in the larger world arena, a minority position.”
Areas of expertise
- Buddhist philosophy and meditation
- Tibetan traditions and the role of women
- Buddhism and feminism
- Mysticism and daily life
- Relation and relevance of traditional knowledge to modern culture
Topics in the News
- Religious pluralism
- Buddhism’s appeal in the West
- The Dalai Lama
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Anne C. Klein is a leading scholar on Buddhism and the founding director of Dawn Mountain, a Tibetan practice and research center in Houston. Her emphasis is on maintaining direct contact with traditional perspectives which are now coming in contact with modern, often politicized and commercialized, western values and highly individualized understandings of selfhood. A common thread of her work is its inquiry into ways of knowing, especially as described in various Tibetan philosophical and meditative systems. To this end, she has studied and practiced with leading Lamas of (in order of her connection to them) the Geluk, Nyingma, and Bon traditions. Since 1970 she has worked closely with master yogis and scholars from three of the five major Tibetan traditions. Her current work expands her earlier research on the interface of women, religion, and the social world. Klein is building bridges between East and West, and ancient and modern thought; her current project involves translating ancient texts that have never been studied in the West.
- Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self (Beacon Press, 1996)
- Path to the Middle: Oral Madhyamika Philosophy in Tibet: The Spoken Scholarship of Kensur Yeshey Tupden (State University of New York Press, 1994)
- Knowing, Naming, and Negation: A Sourcebook on Tibetan Sautrantika (Snow Lion Publications, 1991)
- Knowledge and Liberation: Tibetan Buddhist
Epistemology in Support of Transformative Religious Experience
(Snow Lion Publications, 1987)
- Houston Chronicle, September 20, 2005 "Dalai Lama gives 'Presence' to city; though he calls himself nothing special, his vision inspires millions"
- Houston Chronicle, September 18, 2005 "The Sunday Serving; Karma Knowledge; Earl Tries Again"
- Houston Chronicle, (op-ed) April 5, 2005 ""Prayerful uncertainty at time of loved one's death; Legislation is no answer in such a delicate matter"
Organizational links for this expert
- Dawn Mountain, a Tibetan practice and research center
- Women’s
Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School
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