Kiyota, M.
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While merely a high-school student, he was interned as an American-born but Japan-educated offspring of Japanese parents (kibei) in relocation centers in Tanforan, Topaz, and Tule Lake in 1942 during World War II. In his autobiographical account, Beyond Loyalty: The Story of a Kibei (1997), and in a chapter in his edited volume, The Case of Japanese Americans During World War II: Suppression of Civil Liberty (2004), he described his experiences during this difficult period of his life.
After his release from Tule Lake Segregation Center in 1946, he accepted a scholarship to the College of the Ozarks in Arkansas and later transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his B.A. in East Asian Languages and History in 1949. Min attended the San Francisco Theological Seminary from 1949 to 1950 and worked as a civilian employee of the U.S. Air Force Intelligence Service in Japan and Korea from 1950 to 1953 during the Korean War. He continued to stay in East Asia, attending Tokyo University in Tokyo, Japan from 1953 to 1962, where received his M.A. in 1958 and completed his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies in 1963.
In 1962 Min joined the Department of Indian Studies (later renamed the Department of South Asian Studies and currently designated as the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia - LCA) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor with a joint appointment with the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature in 1968. In 1978 he rose to the rank of Professor.
Min's research interests were wide-ranging but his main area of teaching and scholarship was Mahāyāna Buddhism in East Asia. He emphasized textual research, requiring rigorous training in Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese. In 1989 Min also started teaching Kendō (a Japanese martial art, which descended from traditional swordsmanship) as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Kinesiology. His "Kendo: An Integration of Martial and Liberal Arts," cross-listed with the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature and the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, was the first and only course of its kind taught in a university setting in the USA. Min used his Kendō class to teach Zen Buddhism as the philosophical foundation of Kendō. He stressed the importance of Kendō as a way to overcome fear, to develop one-pointed concentration (for better study habits), to grow personally, and to understand different cultural perspectives on life.
During the course of his employment at UW-Madison, Min published twelve books, numerous articles and book chapters, and supervised thirty-two Ph.D. students, a great number of whom found positions at colleges and major universities in the United States, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam.
Among his books on Buddhism, Shingon Buddhism: Theory and Practice (1978) is a pioneering study of esoteric Buddhism in Japan and remains an important reference work on the subject. Min is best known for his edited volume Mahāyāna Buddhist Meditation, published in 1978 and reprinted in 1991.
Min also published on Kendō, most importantly his comprehensive work Kendo: Its Philosophy, History and Means to Personal Growth (1995), republished as The Shambhala Guide to Kendo (2002). (Source Accessed Jan 14, 2020)
Library Items
The historical approach to Zen in Heinrich Dumoulin's major work, A History of Zen, published over twenty years ago, broke new ground in Western Zen studies. Up to that time Zen publication in the West dealt primarily with interpretive accounts of Zen and translations of Zen or Zen-related texts. I follow here an alternate approach to Zen and seek to place it in the context of one or another aspect of Mahāyāna tradition. One might read Zen in the perspective of Indian Mādhyamika or Yogācāra, or in terms of the Chinese prajñic or Hua-yen doctrinal development. But I would like to place it within the perspective of Tathāgatagarbha thought. (Kiyota, "Tathāgatagarbha Thought," 207)
