My latest “On the Buddhism Beat” post is now online over at Shambhala Sun Space. This week, it’s an interview with our friend, past interviewee, and Buddhist filmmaker James Zito. As I previously mentioned, James recently released his new documentary Inquiry Into the Great Matter: A History of Zen Buddhism. Here’s a snippet from our conversation:
Danny Fisher: There’s a concern across your work about what is referred to in the new film as “the glitzy, the modern and the industrial.” Would you say a bit about this?
James Zito: One of the most important elements in Buddhism is the lineage: in all of the Buddhist traditions available to us today, there is an unbroken lineage of realization which needs to be maintained properly or the tradition is broken and lost. The rapid pace of global development presents a threat to the survival of some of these precious lineages as well as the traditions that constitute them. In fact, some aspects of Buddhism are likely endangered species. Today, for example, there are said to be less than a thousand monks at any given time in the whole of Japan, whereas there used to be a few hundred in just one of the major monasteries.
In my opinion, the rigorous documentation of Buddhist materials is a very important priority of Buddhology. To document something means to make a record of it—preserve it—for the future. Buddhist documentaries have an important role to play in showing how things were and are still in these different places where the traditions are to some extent being eroded.
You know, the Tibetans painstakingly translated all the texts they could get their hands on in a period of the first dissemination of Buddhism to Tibet. Eventually, Atisa, who had come from India, was amazed to find texts in the library at Samye Monastery that had long disappeared from his country. This points to the necessity of carefully preserving everything we can about extant Buddhist traditions because they aren’t simply aspects of history, but keys to enlightenment and liberation, as well as methods for cultivating sanity and connection to basic goodness—spiritual treasures for all mankind.
Read the rest here.
With tongue once again firmly planted in cheek, Sweet the Dirt, Push the Dust’s John Pappas names his twelve best Buddhist Twitterers at elephant journal. I was honored to be among those John named. He writes:
