Meghan Howard Masang
Meghan Howard Masang’s research interests center on the Tibetan adoption and assimilation of Buddhism. She holds a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (2023), and an A.B. in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies from Harvard University (2004). Her dissertation examines the translation career of Wu Facheng 吳法成/Go Chödrup འགོ་ཆོས་གྲུབ་ (d. 864), an influential scholiast and translator of Buddhist scriptures from Chinese to Tibetan and vice versa based in the important Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang. Prior to graduate school, her work as a Tibetan translator and interpreter led her to Songtsen Library in Dehradun, India, where she spent four years translating a modern Tibetan commentary on the Old Tibetan Annals and Old Tibetan Chronicle by H.H. the Drikung Kyabgon Chetsang, published in English as A History of the Tibetan Empire: Drawn from the Dunhuang Manuscripts (Dehra Dun, India: Songtsen Library, 2011; translated with Tsultrim Nakchu).
Courses
EAST 420, RLST 229
Buddhist Ethics
This course explores ethical action in a range of Buddhist traditions, with an emphasis on Mahayana Buddhism in India and Tibet. Rather than starting with the categories of Western philosophy, we seek to develop an account that emerges from Buddhist sources. We begin by establishing a working model of karmic acts—describing the status of agents and patients, the mechanics of karma, and the cosmological and soteriological contexts for action. We then examine the paradigmatic ethical act of giving as embodied by two great virtuous exemplars: the Buddha (archetypal renunciate) and Vessantara (archetypal layman). From there, we turn to case studies of ethical cultivation and negotiation in three realms of Buddhist practice: the Vinaya precepts governing monastic life, the altruism and skillful means of bodhisattvas, and the antinomian ethics of Buddhist tantra. The course concludes with a reflection on the intersection of aesthetics and morality in Buddhist thought.