Special Project

Due April 2, 2020

The Special Project will be a creative or scholarly activity involving one of the following sacred texts of your choice.

For creative projects, you may collaborate with 1-2 fellow classmates or do your own, such as a skit, piece of art, rap or musical piece, martial arts performance, craft, or other demonstration of your interpretation of specific themes or topics related to the texts, philosophies, poetry, plays, or novels that we are studying in this course. If it is a performance, you may record it as a video recording and post to Canvas on the due date.

For scholarly projects, please write an analytical essay of 4 (double-spaced) pages that uses passages from the sacred text and tries to answer a single, interesting question (like, what is Zhuangzi’s attitude towards death?).

This grade is worth 20% of your final grade for the course. The best among these will be chosen and featured in class on the last day, April 30, and everyone who presents on that day will get 10 points extra credit added to one of their exam grades.

Special Project Readings

Note: The translator and version of these texts must be approved by me, so please check with me before purchasing or usingone of these.

The Vedas, entire.

Upanishads (choose ~ 25-50 pages of a specific text)

Puranas (choose ~ 25-50 pages of a specific text)

Ramayana (choose 1-2 chapters)

Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) by Laozi, entire.

Zhuangzi “Inner Chapters”

Analects of Confucius, first 10 Books.

Bhagavad Gita, entire.

Lotus Sutra (choose 1-3 chapters)

Platform Sutra (choose 1-3 chapters)

Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and pre-Zen Writings, entire. Compiled by

Paul Reps