This via the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian, which is hosting two new exhibits of Buddhist art that I blogged about recently. (Thanks to my old friend and professor John E. Cort for the tip.) Watch below, or right here.
My mom, The Quilted Librarian, remembers her mother-in-law, my grandmother, over at her blog. You can read that post here.
As I reported to you all earlier this week, I lost my grandmother last Sunday. She was 80 years old.
“Pampas grass, now dry,
once bent this way
and that.”
- Shoro
Today’s quote is from Seung Sahn Soen-sa (1927-2004), the late Korean Jogye Seon master and founder of the Kwan Um School of Zen. This is it:
Clear mind is like the full moon in the sky. Sometimes clouds come and cover it, but the moon is always behind them. Clouds go away, then the moon shines brightly. So don’t worry about clear mind: it is always there. When thinking comes, behind it is clear mind. When thinking goes, there is only clear mind. Thinking comes and goes, comes and goes. You must not be attached to the coming or the going.
This via the U.S. Campaign for Burma:
In the latest issue of the American Academy of Religion’s Religious Studies News, the great Lama John Makransky, who is associate professor of Buddhism and comparative theology at Boston College, senior advisor to Kathmandu University’s Centre for Buddhist Studies in Nepal, and co-Chair of the Buddhist Critical-Constructive Reflection Group in the AAR, offers his “Buddhist Reflections on Theological Learning and Spiritual Discipline.” Here’s a sampling:
When I teach courses on Buddhism in Boston College, a Catholic university, I try to show many connections between doctrine and practice not just to help students understand Buddhist traditions but also to point them toward analogous integrations of thought and spiritual practice in Christian traditions, and perhaps in their own lives. When Indian and Central Asian Buddhism first began to take root in China in the early centuries CE, most Chinese did not become formally Buddhist, but many took an interest in Buddhist resources to help them reexamine what it means to be a Chinese person, which they understood in broadly Confucian terms. I sense a similar historical moment now in the Western academy — many Christians, Jews, and others are seeking in Buddhism the means to reintroduce themselves to their own spiritual lives and traditions in light of the Buddhist emphasis on connecting philosophical reflection to spiritual discipline.
Pedagogically, I try to help students discern connections between doctrine and practice in three ways: 1) Through lectures and readings that point out relations between Buddhist doctrines and spiritual practices, including ritual, ethical, meditational, psychological and analytical practices; 2) Through studying various manuals of Buddhist practice to see how doctrines are integrated into each element of spiritual discipline; and 3) Through class exercises, adapted from philosophical and meditative traditions of Buddhism, to provide some experiential light on connections between thought and practice.
Read the rest here.
