Christopher Chapple

Christopher Key Chapple is an Indologist and scholar of the renouncing religions of India, namely yoga, Jainism and Buddhism. He is Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. He has written several books on the history and philosophy of yoga, and on the intersection of religion and ecology.

Chapple took his bachelor's degree in comparative literature and religious studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1976. He gained his master's degree in Buddhism at Fordham University in 1978. His PhD in history of religions was also from Fordham, in 1980. He noted in an interview that he initially struggled to reconcile Buddhism's "emptiness" with Yoga's self-realisation, and commented that the Yogavasistha answered the debate on "the tension between emptiness and consciousness in superbly poetic verse." He described the nightly arati ceremonies on the river Ganges each night in the sacred cities of Rishikesh and Varanasi as "sublime".

He has published numerous books and papers on the history and philosophy of Indian religions, and on the intersection of religion and ecology.

Chapple advises the International Summer School of Jain Studies, the Forum on Religion and Ecology (Yale), the Ahimsa Center (Pomona), and the Jaina Studies Centre (SOAS). He founded the Masters Program in Yoga at Loyola Marymount University, where he is Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology.

Yoga

• Karma and Creativity (1986, SUNY)
• Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in Asian Traditions (1993, SUNY)
• Reconciling Yogas (2003, SUNY)
• Yoga and the Luminous: Patanjali's Spiritual Path to Freedom (2008, SUNY)

Edited

• Yoga in Jainism (2015, Routledge)
• Engaged Emancipation: Mind, Morals and Make-Believe in the Moksopaya/Yogavasistha (2016, with Aridam Chakrabarti, SUNY)

Religion and ecology

• Ecological Prospects: Religious, Scientific, and Aesthetic Perspectives (1994, SUNY)
• Hinduism and Ecology (2000, with Mary Evelyn Tucker, Harvard)
• Jainism and Ecology (2002, Harvard)
• Yoga and Ecology (2009, Deepak Heritage)
• In Praise of Mother Earth: The Prthivi Sukta of the Atharva Veda (2011, with O. P. Dwivedi)