Faculty
Faculty Profiles
Caden Hill is a member of the BA ’26 cohort at DRBU. He has been passionate about philosophy and religion from a young age. This led him to Buddhadharma and inspired him to study and translate from Classical Chinese. Caden has studied the Lotus, Avatamsaka, and Shurangama Sutras, and has made efforts to create study groups for the Shurangama before and after coming to DRBU. He is a ceaseless reader with a love for ideas and for the millions of conversations surrounding them.
Gavin Ding is an alumnus of DRBU (BA ’23). During his time at the University, he attended the translation seminar and studied Classical Chinese for two and a half years. Through the language courses, he gained a foundational understanding of the nature of translation, that is, the conveyance of messages across different cultural conditions. Through shared inquiry, he gained a firm grasp of Classical Chinese thinking, along with how they are being interpreted in the English language. He is a humble student of the Classical texts and an aspiring Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor. He is currently studying Traditional Chinese Medicine at Oregon College of Oriental Medicine.
Miguel Gracia is a recent graduate of Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree in History and a minor in European Cultural Studies. He grew up in the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas (CTTB) and grew up speaking Spanish, Chinese, and English at home; he continued to study Spanish during his gap year in Bolivia and Chinese in University courses. He attended Instilling Goodness Elementary and Developing Virtue Secondary School in CTTB and has participated in Chinese-English translations of the Venerable Master Hua’s lectures of the Sixth Patriarch Sutra, the Pure Conduct Chapter of the Avatamsaka Sutra, the Vajra Sutra, the Preface to the Avatamsaka Sutra, and the Lotus Sutra, in addition other written works by the Venerable Master Hua and live translations in the Buddha Hall. He was a participant in the Translation Seminar in 2014 and 2015, and returned as a TA in 2018 and 2019. He has recently completed a year-long English-teaching fellowship in Vietnam.
Nancy Chu graduated from Swarthmore College with high honors in Chinese and English literature. She holds an MDiv in Buddhism at Harvard Divinity School and served as co-leader of the Harvard Buddhist Community for the 2013-14 academic year. Nancy is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Buddhist Studies at Stanford University. She holds, additionally, degree in anthropology. Nancy has been occasionally translating for Dharma Realm Buddhist Association’s monthly journal Vajra Bodhi Sea and evening talks at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas since 2006.
Victoria Pang graduated with a bachelor’s in Asian and Asian American Studies, specializing in Chinese Studies. She fell in love with Classical Chinese poetry when she took the course Libai and Dufu in her freshman year, and went on to develop her senior paper and translation project around Confucian and Buddhist Chinese poetry and intercultural pedagogy. In the summer of 2022, she volunteered as a Chinese and English interpreter in the Shaolin Temple in Richmond, Canada, and realized the importance of the sangha. A year later, she enrolled in the Dharma Realm Buddhist University’s Master’s program where she currently studies Sanskrit and Buddhist Classics.
Zenshin Dillon Balmaceda is a Zen Buddhist priest and is currently serving as the Chaplain at DRBU. He has been practicing in the Zen tradition for close to twenty years at monasteries and temples throughout the US. He was ordained as a Zen priest in 2019 at the San Francisco Zen Center. He enjoys exploring creative ways to practice with others through kitchen work, music, and translations. Zenshin Dillon is deeply committed to the art of translating ancient Buddhist texts. He finds that this practice not only enriches his understanding of the teachings but also brings a deeper sense of meaning and connection to his daily life.
Special Lecturers
Chris Wen-Chao Li received his masters and doctoral degrees in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology from Oxford University, where his research focused on Mandarin sound change and Chinese phonology. He is the author of A Diachronically-Motivated Segmental Phonology of Mandarin Chinese (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), The Routledge Course in Chinese Media Literacy (London: Routledge, 2016) and numerous scholarly treatises on language and translation. His translations of Chinese prose and poetry have appeared in Renditions (Hong Kong) and The Chinese Pen (Taipei), and Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies (London). His current research interests include sound change, language contact, diglossia, standardization, phonological translation, and domesticating translation strategies.