Tao Jin is an Assistant Professor in the Religion Department at Illinois Wesleyan University. He teaches courses on East Asian Buddhism, Zen, East Asian popular religions, Chinese religions, Asian religious literature, Buddhist texts, and scriptural interpretation as a religious practice. 

Professor Jin holds graduate degrees from Tianjin Foreign Languages Institute (M.A., 1994), University of Memphis (M.A., 1999) and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Ph.D., 2008). He specializes in a sixth century Buddhist text entitled Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna, its interpretations, technical issues in Buddhist interpretation, and the theoretical reflections on the practice of interpretation in Chinese Buddhism. He is also interested in the formulation and interpretation of the Chinese cosmology, and the interaction between Confucianism and Buddhism.

Professor Jin has presented his studies at both national- and international-level conferences. His article, entitled “The Formulation of Introductory Topics and the Writing of Exegesis in Chinese Buddhism,” appeared in the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 30.1–2, 2007 (2009): 33–79; another article, “What It Means to Interpret: A Standard Formulation and Its Implicit Corollaries in Chinese Buddhism,” is scheduled for publication in Philosophy East & West 63:4 (Oct. 2013). He is currently working on two projects: 1) making a new annotated English translation (with a study) of the Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna; 2) annotating and re-organizing (kepan) the definitive commentary of The Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna by the Chinese scholar-monk Fazang (643-712).