Is it possible for me to successfully get into a PhD program?
TL;DR: I’m a 28yo high school history teacher in Chicago with a Master's in Education and 10 years of advanced Japanese fluency. I just went through a school closure (and CPS is a mess right now), which has me finally wanting to pursue my dream of a PhD. My goal is to research early Indian Buddhist political philosophy (specifically the Vinaya and Ashokan edicts), using untranslated Japanese scholarship by Hirakawa and Nakamura to bridge the gap in Western research. I’ve spent the last two years hyper-focusing on deep primary/secondary source research to build my own curriculums from scratch, but I don't have recent professor-led research or publications, so I feel like I'm just some random guy applying off the street
I am a 28 year old guy who lives in Chicago. I studied japanese for 10 years of my life. My bachelors degree was in international government and politics, and my minor was in japanese. I became very good at japanese, and helped TA an n1 level class (highest level) and helped create the materials for that class. After college i originally planned to teach english in japan and did successfully get a job there, but the pandemic prevented me from going to japan in 2020 and 2021 to be a teacher. I floated around for a bit after that (i substitute taught japanese for a few months) but came back to Chicago and received my masters in secondary education in social studies after 3 years. I taught at a high school for almost 2 years however the school was shut down by Chicago earlier in the middle of the school year due to financial issues. There I taught World history, US history, Latin American history, Civics, and Media Studies. Recently, in the last week CPS has announced it has lost 7 million dollars and many schools in Chicago are letting go of staff.
I pretty much built the curriculum and materials for the classes I taught on my own, following traditional state and fed guidelines for them. I had these guidelines to follow so I knew what I was supposed to teach (what students had to know) but I was expected to make everything for my classes myself. In making the materials for these classes in my first two years, I poured over what felt like a million scholarly articles and primary/secondary sources, and synthesized them to create year long courses that had their own year long narratives. I've always enjoyed doing the research, and putting a "story" together using all the resources available to me. Even in college I have had an affinity for doing research in the social studies/history field and then writing long essays on them. Many of my old professors said I wrote well at the time. Learning for the sake of itself has always been fun and held meaning to me. Although I guess many of my students would say I was too strict or demanding in the content and skills I wanted them to demonstrate.
I am thinking now that it might be the right time to get my PhD, it is something I have always wanted to do but never gave much actual serious thought towards. I enjoy researching and answering my own questions about the world, writing and explaining, as well as teaching.
I would like to study early Buddhism in India. More specifically, I would like to use my background in government and politics and research how early Indian Buddhist monastic law within the Vinaya as well as the Edicts of King Ashoka constitute a coherent Indian Buddhist political philosophy, and use the reign of Asoka as a case study to investigate the actual implementation of those ideas - comparing and contrasting Indian Buddhist ideas/government with Western political thinkers' ideas/government. Or something.
The reason I mention my Japanese is because Western scholarly research on Buddhism tends to pale in comparison to Japanese scholarly research on Buddhism. There is simply more scholarly research in Japan on Indian Buddhism than in the West, and relies on different Buddhist texts and canon, and obviously much has yet to be used in Western scholarship due to the language barrier. I would like to use the untranslated works of Akira Hirakawa and Hajime Nakamura (two prominent Japanese scholars on Indian Buddhism) to bolster my application and research. I already have had experience reading and translating high level Japanese literature and scientific documents.
Do you think it is possible for me to get a PhD in what id like to focus on? Be honest. Are there other things I should think of researching maybe? Or other things I should do instead? I am worried as i am now 28 and technically my researching experience comes from making the curriculum and materials for my classes and not with any professors. I enjoy research and writing, and I desperately want to know more about early Buddhism in India (it is a passion of mine! and not well researched in the West it seems like) But technically I am just some guy applying off the street it feels like. I do not have any recent true scholarly research experience and I've never published shit. I apologize for rambling, I kinda just typed my thoughts out. But please help me, I'm not sure what I should do.