Maria Heim - The virtue of difference, what efficiency misses, and living well in the world today
Maria Heim studies ancient and classical Indian philosophy and literature. Yet, in her thinking and writing and teaching the canon expanding across the three millennia comes alive, present for each of us, incontrovertibly important to the world we are walking into.
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Dr. Heim is the George Lyman Crosby 1896 & Stanley Warfield Crosby Professor in Religion at Amherst College and a Guggenheim fellow. It would be difficult and imprudent to attempt to describe her through one specialty, as evidenced by her ten books the latest of which will be released in September entitled How to Love (a new translation of a timeless fifth-century Buddhist meditation guide that teaches practices for becoming happier and freer by learning how to love everyone).
However, if I were to give words to some of the inspiration her work sparks in me as an introduction, it would be that she is a reader capable of remarkable attunement to texts across time, an artist of translation, a poet in the sense that poets are those who give us terms that make reality, a discerning scholar, and a student of feeling and emotions.
She holds together things traditionally thought to be in opposition, what F Scott Fitzgerald gestured toward as the sign of a first-rate intelligence, and does so through a belief in open dialogue between these things. These things alongside her curiosity and her openness to new thought, set her work apart in its capacity to widen the space of the possible for me.
Maria is a leading scholar on the thought of the fifth-century Theravada scholar, Buddhaghosa, the moral psychology of Pali Buddhism, the translation of ancient India thought, and the history of emotions. Her 2025 book How to Feel: An Ancient Guide to Minding Our Emotions (Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers) coupled with her 2022 publication Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India throwing open the doors, previously locked by our limited classical English categories for emotion, to our understanding of how we feel.
She received her BA from Reed College and her PhD from Harvard.
She puts in conversation ancient wisdom with our pressing and real need for it today. It would be hard to imagine someone doing more to bring deep history to bear to expand the possibilities of thought for us now than Maria and I'm delighted to be in conversation with her today.