Professional Biography

Prof Cole specializes in close reading Buddhist texts from medieval India and China. In his first book, Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism (Stanford University Press, 1998), he considered the role of family values in the construction of Chinese Buddhism as it took form from the 5th to 13th century.  Then, he published Text as Father: Paternal Seductions in Early Mahayana Buddhist Literature, a book that examines the structure and function of narratives in several Mahayana sutras, including: The Lotus Sutra, The Diamond Sutra, The Tathagatagarbha Sutra, and The Vimalakirtinirdesa, (University of California Press, 2005.)

Most recently, Prof Cole published a book that reconsiders the origins of Chan (Zen) in terms of 7th and 8th court politics and authorial invention. This book Fathering Your Father: The Zen of Fabrication in Tang Buddhism, (University of California Press, 2009) grew out of an earlier essay that sought to trace Chan's origins in terms of the innovative use of Confucian funerary rites, rites that were employed to secure and legitimize the reproduction of the monastic elite; see his "Upside Down/Right Side Up: A Revisionist History of Buddhist Funerals in China," in History of Religions, 35: 4, (May, 1996): 307-338.

Along the way, he also contributed the Buddhism section to The Columbia Reader on Sex, Marriage, and Family in the World Religions, ed. Donald Browning and Christian Green (Columbia University Press, 2006).

On sabbatical for the year 08-09, Prof Cole has been working on a book entitled Fetishizing Tradition: Desire and Reinvention in Buddhist and Christian Narratives. This work, as the title suggests, aims at extending a number of theoretical insights drawn from his earlier works to see if they might not also be useful in reading early Christian literature, in particular, the Pauline Letters and the Gospel of Mark. The two Buddhist texts treated in this book are The Land of Bliss and The Platform Sutra. Readers interested in relaying commentary regarding these books, chapters, or articles are invited to contact Prof Cole at his school email address: cole@lclark.edu.

Academic Credentials

Ph.D. 1994 University of Michigan

M.A. 1988 University of Virginia

B.A. 1985 Middlebury College