Contributors to This Issue Bhikkhu Bodhi, a native of New York City, was ordained in Sri Lanka after completing his doctoral studies in philosophy at Claremont Graduate University. He spent thirty years in Sri Lanka and became a leader in the translation of Pali texts. His many translations include The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya (with Bhikkhu Nanamoli), Numerical Discourses of the Buddha: An Anthology of Suttas from the Anguttara Nikaya (with Nyanaponika Thera), and The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Samyutta Nikaya. He currently lives and teaches at Chuang Yen Monastery in Carmel, New York, and at Bodhi Monastery in Lafayette, New Jersey. Raoul Birnbaum is professor of Buddhist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he also holds the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in History of Art and Visual Culture. His early works include The Healing Buddha, Studies on the Mysteries of Mañjuśrī, and a group of articles about the great mountain pilgrimage center Wutaishan. More recently, he has been writing about issues in modern Chinese Buddhist history, including a series of essays about the remarkable twentieth-century monk Hongyi. Professor Birnbaum’s work is considerably influenced by many years of study within Chinese Buddhist communities. Hozan Alan Senauke is vice-abbot of Berkeley Zen Center, a Soto Zen temple in the tradition of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. He is also founder of the Clear View Project, which develops Buddhist-based resources for social change and support around the world. As an activist, thinker, and writer, Senauke has been at the center of engaged Buddhist circles for twenty years. He also performs widely as an interpreter of American folk and traditional music. Amelia Barili is a senior lecturer in the Spanish and Portuguese department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her current research and writing focus on the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’s lifelong interest in Buddhism and his writings and conversations concerning Buddhism. Douglas George-Kanentiio is an award-winning Mohawk author and film consultant. He has served as editor of Akwesasne Notes, an international journal about indigenous people, and of Indian Time, a newspaper serving the Mohawk Nation. His books include Skywoman, Iroquois on Fire, and Iroquois Culture and Commentary, and he was a contributor to Treaty ISSUE 9, OCTOBER 2009
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of Canandaigua, A Seat at the Table, and Sovereignty, Colonialism, and the Indigenous Nations. He lectures widely and has long been active in Iroquois affairs, most recently in the founding of Onehtah'kowa-Haudenosaunee University. Joseph Molleur is associate professor of religion at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, where he teaches courses on Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. He is the author of Divergent Traditions, Converging Faiths: Troeltsch, Comparative Theology, and the Conversation with Hinduism. He is a member of both Trinity Episcopal Church in Iowa City and the Vedanta Society of Iowa. Karma Lekshe Tsomo is an associate professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Diego, where she teaches Buddhism, world religions, and comparative religious ethics. She studied Buddhism in Dharamsala, India, for fifteen years and received her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Hawai'i, with research on death and identity in China and Tibet. She is president of Sakyadhita: The International Association of Buddhist Women and director of Jamyang Foundation, an innovative education project for women in developing countries. Her most recent book is Into the Jaws of Yama, Lord of Death: Buddhism, Bioethics, and Death. Martin Zwick, professor of systems science at Portland State University, was awarded his Ph.D. in biophysics at M.I.T. in 1968 and joined the biophysics department faculty of the University of Chicago in 1969. His interests shifted from biophysics to systems theory, the field now known as the study of chaos, complexity, and complex adaptive systems. Since 1976 he has been teaching and doing research in the Systems Science Graduate Program at PSU, and from 1984–1989 he was director of the program. His main research areas are information theory, theoretical biology, and systems philosophy. He has been on the faculty committee for the Judaic Studies Program at PSU since its inception. His online publications that bear on religion include: “A Conversation on Theodicy,” “Systems Metaphysics: A Bridge from Science to Religion,” and “Personal Knowledge and the Inner Sciences.”
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RELIGION EAST & WEST