Dana Sawyer | |
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Born | Jonesport, Maine, United States | July 4, 1951
Occupation | Professor of Religion |
Known for | Author of Aldous Huxley: A Biography, author of the authorized biography Huston Smith: Wisdomkeeper: Living The World's Religions |
Spouse | Stephani Briggs |
Children | (from previous marriage) Sophie Sawyer and Emma Sawyer |
Dana Sawyer is professor emeritus of religious studies and world religions at the Maine College of Art & Design and an adjunct professor in Asian Religions at the Chaplaincy Institute of Maine.[1] He is the author of numerous published papers and books, including Aldous Huxley: A Biography,[2] which Laura Huxley described as, "Out of all the biographies written about Aldous, this is the only one he would have actually liked."
Huston Smith, Wisdomkeeper, Sawyer's authorized biography of world religion scholar Huston Smith, was published in 2014.[3][4][5]
Huxley and Smith were close friends and were leading advocates of the perennial philosophy, which describes an underlying reality to material existence. Huxley's 1945 book, The Perennial Philosophy, argues that the concept is revealed in the mystical branches of all the world's religions. Sawyer's updated account of the perennial philosophy, The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded will be published in July, 2024.[6]
Dana Sawyer was born in Jonesport, Maine in 1951 to Waide and Joanne Sawyer, and after the age of nine grew up with a younger sister, Cynthia, and brother, Paul, in the nearby village of Milbridge, where his father was a wholesale lobster buyer.
He has been involved in fund-raising activities for the Siddhartha School Project in Stok, Ladakh, north India, for more than ten years.[7] This project has resulted in the construction of an elementary/ middle/high school for underprivileged Buddhist children that has been visited twice by the Dalai Lama, who holds it as a model for blending traditional and Western educational ideals. Much of his work for this project has involved translating at lectures for (and teaching with) the school's founder, Khen Rinpoche Lobzang Tsetan, who is the abbot of the Panchen Lama's monastery near Mysore, India.[8][9]
Sawyer's interest in the phenomenon of Neo-Hindu and Buddhist groups in America led him to become a popular lecturer on topics of interest to these groups. He has taught at the Kripalu Center (Lenox, Massachusetts), the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (Barre, Massachusetts), the Vedanta Society of Southern California (Hollywood, California), the Esalen Institute[10] in Big Sur, California, and other such venues. This work has also brought him into contact with several important figures in this field, including Stanislav Grof, Andrew Harvey, Huston Smith, Laura Huxley, Stephen Cope, Jeffery Kripal, and Alex Grey.
Sawyer has been to India eighteen times, most recently while leading the study abroad program in India for the Maine College of Art & Design in 2019, and has traveled extensively throughout the subcontinent: Nepal, Pakistan, Sikkim, Thailand, Cambodia, Hong Kong, and Japan.
Related to academic work Sawyer has lectured at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, Banaras Hindu University, the University of Riga, Latvia, the Huntington Library, and at colleges and conferences throughout the United States (interview footage of Sawyer from the Riga conference was featured in a British documentary, "Brand New World," on the dangers of consumer culture). In August, 2005, Sawyer was a participant in the by-invitation-only conference on "Government, Education, and Religion" at the Oxford Roundtable, Lincoln College, Oxford University. He is a member of two academic societies: the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (SACP) and the International Aldous Huxley Society, centered at the University of Munster in Germany.
Ph.D. candidate, University of Iowa, School of Religion, Iowa City, Iowa (comprehensive examinations, May 1988). Major: History of Asian Religions with a primary focus on religion in modern India. Dissertation unfinished, though much of it has been published.
M.A., University of Iowa, School of Religion, History of Asian Religions, 1993.
Oxford University, Oxford, England. Accepted by the Oriental faculty to study for the Department of Philosophy, with Richard Gombrich as advisor. Attended during the Michelmas term, 1980.
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario. Graduate courses in Sanskrit and Indian Philosophy (with Bimal Motilal), Fall 1978.
M.A., University of Hawaiʻi, Department of Asian Studies, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1978. Major: The Religions of India.
B.A., Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, Connecticut 1973. Major: World Literature. Minor: philosophy.