Paul L. Swanson

It was a great honor for me to occupy the Roche Chair during the COVID years, immediately after my official retirement from Nanzan University, and to continue participating in the work of the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture. The post allowed me to concentrate on translating the Fahuaxuanyi 法華玄義, the second of “three great works” of Tiantai Zhiyi, to follow up on my Numata Award-winning translation of the Mohezhiguan 摩訶止観 (Clear Serenity, Quiet Insight, 3 vols., University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018).

I originally arrived at the Nanzan Institute in 1986 to join the staff as an editorial assistant to help with the various journal and book publications. I concentrated mostly on the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies and eventually (in 1990) shifted to the position of a Permanent Fellow and editor of the JJRS, which I continued to work on for the next thirty-some years. I had the privilege of participating in the various activities of the Nanzan Institute, including inter-religious dialogue, inter-religious and inter-cultural research, academic publications, study groups and conferences, projects with external funding (such as a major, long-term Templeton Foundation grant), and much more. I was able to publish a good amount of research (in addition to Clear Serenity), such as Foundations of T’ien-t’ai Philosophy (1989), Pruning the Bodhi Tree (1997), the Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions (2006), Brain Science and Kokoro (2011), In Search of Clarity: Essays on Translation and Tiantai Buddhism (2018), numerous translations in the BDK English Tripitaka, and so forth. The time in the Roche Chair was a great opportunity, as the purpose of the Chair proclaims, to continue my research and contribute to the work of the Nanzan Institute. I will always remember it fondly as the culmination of a long and fruitful involvement in interreligious studies and the Nanzan Institute.