Cultures and Religions of the Himalayan Region

Mr. John De Lisa
Religious Studies Department
St. Joseph Hill Academy
Staten Island, New York

Lesson 2

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This implementation plan is designed for the students of St. Joseph Hill Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school on Staten Island, New York City's smallest borough. As a Catholic school, St. Joseph Hill requests that each student engage in a four-year curriculum of religious studies. In senior year the students have the opportunity to elect a semester's term of World Religions, a college extension course, for which they may receive three credits applicable to accredited, participating institutions throughout the United States. My training as a Catholic theologian has concentrated primarily upon systematics, that is, dogmatic theology. Accordingly, my interest in the institute Culture and Religions of the Himalayan Region sought both to broaden and deepen my understanding and appreciation of those religious traditions indigenous to the Himalayan region. The institute has not disappointed me. It has provided me with the opportunity to explore the reciprocal relationships between religions, intersecting cultures, and habitats. My fundamental concern is to convey my own critically informed experience and insights with my students who, possessed with intelligence and wholesome curiosity, deserve a well-planned and academically challenging presentation.

My vision is to develop a curricular unit which will explore the religious response of two basic Eastern religious systems (Buddhism and Hinduism) to the phenomenon of human existence. This unit will comprise three lessons dealing respectively with the "habitat" of human life -- a lesson originating in the geological formation of the Himalayas, and then extrapolating into the Himalayan region as metaphor for human existence; next, the physically transcendent, life-negating response to the sensory world as evidenced in Tibetan Buddhism; and, finally, the presentation of the necessarily complementary response of wisdom or life-affirmation as witnessed in Gangetic Hinduism. As is evident, this unit's approach is thematic, utilizing only selective components of the exemplary religions. This unit, then, will serve as an introductory vehicle, allowing my students ample space to pursue broader and more focused elements of these religions in their follow-up projects.