Peter was a specialist on Chinese Buddhism during the Tang and Song periods. He was renowned for his groundbreaking work on the Chan and Huayan figure Guifeng Zongmi, which led to two books, Tsung-mi and the Sinification of Buddhism (1991), and Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity: An Annotated Translation of Tsung-mi’s Yüan jen lun with a Modern Commentary (1995). Zongmi was his lifelong obsession. At the time of his death, Peter was continuing to work on a massive multi-volume, copiously annotated translation of Zongmi’s magnum opus, the Chan Preface, with an extensive scholarly commentary. It is hoped that at least some portions of this project will find their way into print.
Peter may be perhaps best known to the field for his long-time service as executive director and president of the Kuroda Institute for the Study of Buddhism, from 1984 until his retirement from Smith College in 2014. The Kuroda Institute established two important book series, both copublished by the University of Hawaii Press: Studies in East Asian Buddhism and Classics in East Asian Buddhism. Peter built these series up from scratch until they became two of the preeminent series in the field of Buddhist Studies. Peter did not have his own graduate students, but gave generously of his time and scholarly expertise in helping young scholars transform their unwieldly dissertations into masterful, and often prize-winning, first books. He was a consummate mentor to junior faculty in the field, guiding them with his typical competence and empathy.
In addition to his authored volumes, Peter was also a masterful editor of multiauthor volumes that derived from conferences he sponsored through the Kuroda Institute, including Sudden and Gradual: Approaches to Enlightenment in Chinese Thought (1987) and Buddhism in the Sung (1999, with Daniel A. Getz, Jr.). These were no mere collection of papers. As editor, Peter demanded extensive rewrites of all the conference papers, so that contributors’ chapters were not simply stand-alone studies but directly engaged in issues raised in each others’ chapters. Peter also wrote an extensive introduction to each volume, framing each chapter within a larger set of issues addressed by the volume as a whole. These volumes demonstrated how the best edited volumes could be far more than the sum of their parts and served as a model for other multiauthor volumes published through the Studies in East Asian Buddhism series.
Peter’s scholarly interests in Buddhism developed in part due to his long-time practice of Zen with Maezumi Roshi and the Los Angeles Zen Center. This engagement with American instantiations of the religion led to an increasing focus in his research and teaching on Buddhism in America, which culminated in the documentary film The Gate of Sweet Nectar: Feeding Hungry Ghosts in an American Zen Community (2004) and the coedited volume Women Practicing Buddhism: American Experiences (2007). Peter’s interest in matters of the mind started as an undergraduate at Princeton back in the 1960s, when he worked at the New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute on a series of experiments on the hypnotic alteration of perception. Peter was the hypnotist and his subject was Harold (Hal) Roth, now professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies and director of the Contemplative Studies Initiative at Brown University.
Peter is survived by his beloved wife, Marguerite (Margi), his two daughters and their spouses, Jyana and Earl Browne and Tara and Steph Gregory, and his granddaughter, Sophie.
--Robert Buswell, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Affiliations & relations
- Smith College · workplace affiliation
