Iljea Lee is in his final year in the PhD program. He has a B.A. in Philosophy from Queens College of the City University of New York, an M.A. in Philosophy from Boston University, and an M.Div. from Yale Divinity School. He spent four years at Harvard University as a Non-Degree student studying Sanskrit and Pali. Recently, he taught at the University of Hawaii at Manoa as a Lecturer in the Religions and Ancient Civilizations Department, and at Manhattan University (Bronx, NY) as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Religion and Philosophy Department.
Iljea’s research area is in early Buddhism, with additional focus on early Jainism. Iljea’s research in early Buddhism incorporates texts not only from the Pali Canon, but also from the Chinese Agamas, Sanskrit, and Gandhari texts from the early period. Also, his research looks at how early Buddhist ideas compare with ideas in early Jainism.
Currently, his dissertation looks at the development of the “No-self” doctrine and challenges the prevailing notion that the Buddha taught a “No-self” doctrine in order to oppose the Upanisadic concept of atman. He argues that rather than opposing the concept of atman, the Buddha’s interest in the early texts (the Suttanta) was to express ascetic ideals of non-clinging to one’s physical and mental experiences, which ran parallel to Jain ideals of physical asceticism. In turn, Iljea argues that the “No-self” doctrine is a later development, which resulted from a steady development of ideas culminating in what we know today as the “No-self” doctrine, which states that what we call a “self” is merely a conventional term to denote the ever-changing skandhas within the human being, underlying which, ultimately, there is no self or person. Such notion of the “No-self” doctrine, iljea argues, is not expressed in the Buddhist texts of the early period.