Cultures and Religions of the Himalayan Region

Lisa Faden
Newton North High School, Newton, MA
Tibet in an Asian Studies Curriculum

Himalayan Buddhism

China-Tibet Relations

Main Page

This site is a project for the Cultures and Religions of the Himalayan Region 2004 NEH Summer Institute. It contains some ideas for using what I learned in these five weeks in my senior elective course. I hope that these resources and activities will be useful to other high school teachers and could be used in a variety of history or social studies courses.

My course is called East Asian Studies, and it takes a thematic, interdisciplinary approach to the culture and history of China and Japan. Some of the major themes in the course are geography, religion, philosophy, artistic traditions, law and political institutions, and social change. Tibet offers interesting content for each of these themes, but for this project, I will focus on the topics of geography, Buddhism, and China-Tibet relations.

I am very grateful to Professors Todd Lewis of the College of the Holy Cross and Leonard van der Kujip of Harvard University for their inspired teaching and exhaustive efforts in making the Cultures and Religions of the Himalayan Region an exciting learning opportunity for me.