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Sarah Aptilon, Ph.D.

Sarah Aptilon

Associate Professor of Religious Studies 

Sarah Aptilon offers courses on world religions, Asian religions, and Japanese culture. Her research interests include Japanese Buddhist mythology, Buddhist material culture and social history, mindfulness practice in Buddhist and non-Buddhist cultures, and religious enculturation and cross-cultural communication. She earned a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University.  

Sarah has explored the world of Japanese culture and religion for many years as a teacher, writer, and translator. Before embarking on her doctoral studies, she lived and practiced at a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto for seven years. Drawing upon this experience, she leads meditation classes at JCCC and for Turning Point, a subsidiary of the University of Kansas Health System. She has taught courses on Japanese religion at Stanford University and Santa Clara University, and has been a visiting scholar at the Centro de Estudios de Asia y África at El Colegio de México in Mexico City and at the Historiographical Institute at the University of Tokyo. Her publications include “Goddess Genealogy in the Ono Shingon Tradition” in Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia: A Handbook for Scholars, edited by Charles D. Orzech et al. (Leiden and Boston: E. J. Brill, 2010). She works as a translator of Buddhist texts, most recently in collaboration with Tenshin Reb Anderson Roshi of No Abode Hermitage in Mill Valley, California, and with Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai America. She served as executive editor of a Japanese government project to promote international tourism at the Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Related Sites in the Munakata Region, a UNESCO World Heritage site. In addition to her time in Japan, Sarah spent eight years in Mexico City, and over the past two decades she has conducted hundreds of training and teambuilding courses for global companies throughout the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, often presenting courses in Japanese and Spanish.

As a playwright, Sarah has had her work produced and developed in the Kansas City area by The Living Room Theatre, Midwest Trust Center, Kansas City Public Theatre, The Fishtank, Potluck Productions, and Rising Tide Productions. In June 2024 her full-length play Deep Dark Nothingness was staged at Midwest Trust Center in collaboration with The Living Room Theatre. She is currently at work on a full-length play called The Signer, which has been commissioned by Spinning Tree Theatre and will be presented in a world premiere production in April 2026. For the past two years she has served as a playwright mentor for the Teen Writers Fest at Spinning Tree Theatre, and as a writing mentor and literary judge for the Shooting Stars Scholarship Program through the Arts Council of Johnson County.

Sarah is originally from Johnson County, and returned to the Kansas City area with her family in 2012.