August 26, 2024 | By Kayleigh Steele (AGI22, EC25)

After eyeing the St. John’s College Program for most of her life, Stephanie Spong finally graduated this August with her Master of Arts in Eastern Classics from the St. John’s College Graduate Institute. 

Spong has felt a tug toward Eastern culture since age 15, when she received a Rotary Youth Exchange scholarship to live and study in Japan. There, a teacher introduced her to the “Ten Oxherding Pictures.” The series of drawings and poems from the Zen tradition describes the Buddhist practitioner’s progress toward enlightenment, which she says have followed her ever since—and which she greeted again as old friends in a Dōgen preceptorial in the spring.

While she didn’t attend St. John’s as an undergraduate, Spong has spent most of her adult life self-studying the classics. After landing her first job at Goldman Sachs in the 1980s, her first move was to buy a complete set of the Great Books of the Western World series—an investment which she recalls set her back an entire month’s after-tax income. “I went to my husband, and he says, ‘But how are we going to pay our rent next month?’ And I was like, ‘I know, but I have the Great Books series; now my life is good!’”

Like the Great Books, Spong’s interests are vast and varied. She paired her study of economics with Asian studies as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University and minored in Japanese and physics. (“And I almost had a minor in Chinese as well!”) Spong then earned her MBA from Harvard Business School and embarked on a career in strategy, operations, and finance, including over a decade as a venture capitalist working with companies in the U.S., Mexico, Japan, and Hong Kong.

After decades in the business world—and a heart attack that provided a stark reminder of her own impermanence—Spong shifted her focus to quiet study and contemplation. She describes her turn from career woman to scholar in terms familiar to the Eastern Classics (EC) student: “In our readings in the Eastern Classics program, we learned several times about the habit or idea among some of the early Indian cultures to do your householder work: to work in the world, to lead, to be a king, to be a warrior, to do your wifely duty—whatever your dharma is—and then after that time, you retire to the forest. And I had a strong compulsion in my younger years to go out into the world, to be in the world, and to do things in the world. I was very ambitious, and I worked very hard, [but] I got to a point where I really began to long for the forest.”

Spong says that Buddhism has gradually become a part of her life, although she resists labeling herself as such. As a young woman, she read Buddhist sutras and Alan Watts, whose work popularized Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Then, around the year 2000, she met a Tibetan teacher who began instructing her in Buddhist practice—but, she says, forbade further reading.

“The first thing my teachers saw was an over-intellectual young lady who will read herself to death but not actually practice, and so I was forbidden by my teachers from sitting around and reading Buddhist texts. They said, ‘Don’t read books. Practice.’” So Spong was surprised at her teacher’s reaction years later when she asked him to write a recommendation letter for her St. John’s application. “He says, ‘Oh, it’s about time you read the books.’ Like, you’re the one who told me not to!” she laughs. “He says, ‘Well, that was for the first couple of months.’ You know, to get over my respect for authority. And I’m doing that.”

Spong describes her experience in the EC as a low-residency student as a process of organizing many of the disparate ideas she has encountered throughout her life, learning to tease apart the Taoist philosophy that she had previously attributed to Buddhism and discovering there is there is, in fact, no singular Buddhist philosophy or practice but many “Buddhisms.” “I was able to see the evolution of the ideas,” she says. “It was very exciting for me because I’ve never read the Buddhist discourses from the early, early years, but the principles [I had been taught] just shone out of the pages at me.”

As she completes her time with St. John’s—an experience she characterizes as “more alive and more interesting than I dared to hope”—Spong, ever the student, is now organizing a post-graduation self-study program that will allow her more time to linger over favorite texts and topics. For instance, Spong was surprised to find that the program had a strong emphasis on another special interest of hers, aesthetics, considered variously in texts like the Dhvanyāloka and The Pillow Book.

Spong is also at work on two historical fiction novels: one telling the story of the court painter to Marie Antoinette; the other a steampunk alternate history of the tumultuous end of the samurai period of Japan, a project bolstered by recent immersion in Japanese literature and philosophy this past summer. “All of this will help me have better grounded history and philosophy underneath what I want to be light and fun and adventurous, and a page turner. But I want to bring that depth to it,” she explains. “I always want to present the history honestly and correctly. Even if I’m doing alternate history, it has to be real.”

Now, after a career that took her around the world and to the heights of technology and commerce, Spong looks forward to many quiet years of reading, writing, and practice in the metaphorical forest—her long sought-after study at St. John’s being only a first foray. “For me there’s just so much to work with,” she reflects. “I have seeds, I have manure, I have dirt. I’m going to plant a big garden of ideas and play in it for the rest of my life.”