Buddhist Studies Footnotes

A conversation between Kody Muncaster and two representatives from the international Rainbodhi LGBTQIA+ Buddhist Community: Tenzin Tseme from Rainbodhi USA and Myra Blankenship from Rainbodhi Melbourne/Naarm. Rainbodhi is a network for LGBTQIA+ Buddhists to come together in community, sharing dharma and spiritual friendship. Rainbodhi has chapters all over the world. This episode explores Rainbodhi’s work, as well as the challenges faced by trans folks in Buddhism and how we can work to create a queer engaged Buddhism that is welcoming to all. This episode is part of a series of interviews with queer folks in Buddhism and Buddhist Studies. 

A conversation between Kody Muncaster and Jampa Wurst, as part of a series of interviews with queer folks in Buddhism and Buddhist Studies. Dr. Jampa Wurst is a queer, non-binary Buddhist and founder of the International Queer Buddhist Conference (IQBC). Dr. Wurst has a PhD in Comparative Studies in Religion from  the Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany, completing a dissertation on Tibetan Buddhist Nuns and the Sakyadhita Network, an English translation of which was published in 2025 as Identity in Exile: Tibetan Buddhist Nuns and the Network Sakyadhītā.    Kody Muncaster, PhD, the host of this series, has an MA in Buddhist Studies (University of South Wales) and a PhD in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (Western University). They are an OCSWSSW Psychotherapist and Clinical Director of Pink Lotus Counselling & Psychotherapy, and they have taught at the Buddhism, Psychology, and Mental Health program at the University of Toronto as well as at Western University’s Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. They began a three-year training to become a Zen priest under Venerable Bhikkhuni Thích Nũ’ Tinh Quang in 2024. Kody Muncaster is the author of the 2025 book, Queer Engaged Buddhism: Trans(forming) Buddhist Studies (Sumeru Press).  

A conversation with Colin Simonds, Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Alberta. His research focuses on how Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice are relevant to contemporary issues facing the more-than-human world. His doctoral thesis, titled "Moral Phenomenology in a More-Than-Human World: A New Approach to Buddhist Environmental Ethics," offers an interpretation of Buddhist ethics as a moral phenomenology and proposes a phenomenological approach to animal and environmental ethics from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective. Dr. Simonds is also interested in broader questions of animal ethics, environmental ethics, contemplative studies, yoga studies, and Buddhist studies. In this conversation with Frances Garrett, part of a Footnotes series on posthumanist approaches to the study of Buddhism, Dr. Simonds explores intersections of Buddhism, environmental ethics, and animal ethics. He talks about his work on deep ecology and on the feminist care ethics tradition, emphasizing the importance of relationship, community, and feeling. He also considers expanding traditional Buddhist understandings of sentience to include non-human animals, plants, and even maybe AI. This episode of Buddhist Studies Footnotes was created, produced and edited by Frances Garrett, with support from the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto. This project aims to make Buddhist Studies research freely accessible to students and the public.

A conversation with Nan Kathy Lin, visiting assistant professor at Oberlin College in religious ethics and critical thought. Her work focuses on East Asian Buddhism, environmentalism, and moral philosophy as informed by ordinary language philosophy. In this conversation with Frances Garrett, part of a Footnotes series on posthumanist approaches to the study of Buddhism, Nan Kathy Lin talks about her work on developing a theory of religious change as seen through Buddhist environmentalism, drawing on philosophy of language and theoretical biology. She discusses the use of the concept of "interdependence" by 20th-century environmentalists, and she traces how the word interdependence as a translation of the Buddhist term paticca-samuppada should be seen as a response to moral concepts, such as growth or progress, embedded in 20th-century industrial political economy. This episode of Buddhist Studies Footnotes was created, produced and edited by Frances Garrett, with support from the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto. This project aims to make Buddhist Studies research freely accessible to students and the public.

A conversation with Matt King, professor of Buddhist studies at the University of California, Riverside. King is also the director of Asian studies and co-director of the medical humanities program at UCR. His research traces encounters between Buddhist scholasticism, science, humanism and state socialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In this conversation with Frances Garrett, part of a Footnotes series on posthumanist approaches to the study of Buddhism, Matt King talks about his new research on the Gobi desert in the long 19th century. He discusses frontiers and zones of exchange between Tibetan and Mongolian communities in early 20th century China and Buddhist perspectives on nature, culture, and science. He talks about how nature/culture binaries may be understood newly through the lens of Buddhism, Indigenous studies, Black feminist studies, and models of planetary thinking, and about how the concept of nature is used to justify power structures, including colonialism and imperialism. He describes how his research with Mongolian and Tibetan sources suggests that knowledge and environments are co-produced and fundamentally perspectival. This episode of Buddhist Studies Footnotes was created, produced and edited by Frances Garrett, with support from the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto. This project aims to make Buddhist Studies research freely accessible to students and the public.