A Charity Aims to Bring Buddhist Studies Into the Modern World

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HONG KONG, China -- Robert Y.C. Ho, a scion of a historic Hong Kong family, is the chairman of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, which supports study in the fields of Buddhism, Chinese art and culture. The charity is named after Mr. Ho’s father, who founded it in 2005.

It has given endowments for Buddhist programs at Harvard University, Stanford University and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. In May, it gave a $1.9 million grant to the American Council of Learned Societies for the research and teaching of Buddhist studies.

Why did your father decide to focus on Buddhism?

Buddhism was easier because his grandmother, Lady Clara, set up a temple in Hong Kong, Tung Lin Kok Yuen, in 1935 — it later grew to two charity organizations, in Hong Kong and Canada — and there’s a school associated with it. So Buddhism has been part of the family.

We also support Chinese art and culture because my father, who grew up in Hong Kong, appreciates Chinese arts — classical, traditional and contemporary.

Buddhist studies are usually associated with history. How do you make them relevant to today?

Generally speaking, Buddhist studies in higher institutions have been archaic and old-fashioned, in the sense that it’s mostly text-based, where we have scholars who are experts in Pali, Sanskrit, classical Chinese, Japanese, old languages. They read these texts and they talk about them. A lot of time, it’s not really related to what happens in the real world.

But a lot of younger scholars are pushing into new areas, like studying about Buddhism and politics, Buddhism and the environment, conflict resolution, Buddhism and psychology, things like that, and how they manifest in the world. Most of our grants are geared toward the area, which is Buddhism in the contemporary world. This is the area we want to push, to advance the field, to make it relevant to the contemporary audiences.

Why do you work largely with universities and institutions in the West, as opposed to in China or other parts of Asia?

We’re looking for the right partner, the right institution. The standard of scholarship is traditionally, at least in the modern and contemporary era, much higher in North America and the West, so there’s a practical consideration.

We’re looking into working in China, but they’re all state-funded institutions. That makes it tricky to find a partner.

Southeast Asia is another story. For example, in Thailand and Sri Lanka, they have a category of institutions called Buddhist universities, and they study Buddhism in a traditional way. They take their model back from India in the Middle Ages: They have a big monastery and next to the monastery, they would have a university where they’d teach Buddhist scholarship from a traditional point of view. That’s not what we’re looking for.

Through Tung Ling Kok Yuen in Hong Kong, we helped set up the Buddhist Studies Center at Hong Kong University — it was before we started the family foundation. After we’ve started the foundation, most of our grants for Buddhist-related areas are mostly through the foundation.

In Hong Kong, where the foundation is based, you seem to focus on arts and culture education. Why is that?

With Hong Kong being mostly Chinese, we see the program as under the umbrella of Chinese art and culture. It’s a basic belief that arts and creativity are part of a human being and the human psyche — that is important to make a person well-rounded, and to have some exposure to that is very important. It’s important not only to individuals but also to a healthy society.

The government has some initiatives to try to make Hong Kong a culture or art hub.

They are putting a lot of effort in the hardware. That’s good, that’s an important part of it, but you also need the audience.

The software is the education program, so that people who go to art events can appreciate, talk about and criticize them. You need that aspect. What we are trying to do is a small bit, but we believe if Hong Kong wants to be a world city, it needs this component.

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Buddhist Voters Aim To Bring Mindfulness To The Ballot Box

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Washington D.C., USA -- The mindfulness movement has seeped into Silicon Valley, Capitol Hill, and even the United States Military Academy at West Point. Next stop: the voting booth.

A new California-based group wants the estimated 5 million Americans who practice mindfulness to move off their meditation cushions and into the polls on Tuesday (Nov. 6).

If meditation can calm hyperactive kids, ease the pain of drug addicts and tame the egos of Fortune 500 CEOs, it can surely help a stressed-out and polarized country choose a president, says the Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams.

An artist and veteran activist from Berkeley, Williams is the force behind MindfulVOTES, a nonpartisan campaign that she believes is the first attempt to mobilize mindfulness meditators.

"Mindfulness practices are maturing in our country and entering the mainstream, but if it's not applied in our lives, it doesn't matter," said Williams. "It's time for our community to go beyond its own navels."

Broadly defined, mindfulness is a meditative practice designed to encourage a clear and nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment, often by observing one's breath. In Buddhism, mindfulness is one of the seven factors of enlightenment and a step on the Noble Eightfold Path.

Organizing meditators politically -- especially its leading Buddhist teachers -- has proven more difficult than expected, Williams said. "You know the phrase 'like herding cats'? This is like herding lions and tigers."

Hoping to leverage attention during an election year, the group raised funds to attend the Democratic and GOP conventions this summer. It followed the leads of the liberal group MoveOn.org and the League of Women Voters by encouraging activists to host "mindful circles" and circulate an online voting pledge.

MindfulVOTES also solicited the services of 250 "mindful" leaders and tapped 20 A-list ambassadors, including Rep. Tim Ryan, an Ohio congressman who practices mindfulness meditation.

"We will demonstrate that the Mindful community is a block of conscious voters, engaging in politics in a new and impactful way," the group says.

Williams, who defines herself as "post-Zen" and practices at the new Dharma Community in Berkeley, said MindfulVOTES hopes to attract diverse strands of Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Christian and nontheistic meditators. According to researchers, more than 1 million Americans take up meditation each year.

But Williams said the only a small number of mindful circles have organized thus far and the pledge-to-vote campaign faltered. "We're learning as we go along," she said. "This is a huge exercise in getting our feet wet."

There is no central Buddhist hierarchy or organization in the U.S. Instead, dozens of small groups dot the landscape, from Japanese-American devotees of Amida Buddha and Tibetan refugees to Zen converts. Many Buddhist clergy are part time and spend their few free hours building their own institutions, Williams said.

Still, Buddhist ethics and philosophy contain clear moral mandates, including the need to take political responsibility, said the Rev. Danny Fisher, a leading young Buddhist activist.

"Mindfulness, wisdom and ethical action are like three legs of a stool," said Fisher, a professor and coordinator of the Buddhist chaplaincy department at University of the West in Rosemead, Calif. "Buddhists in North America tend to focus on the first leg. Thinking about ethical issues, our role in the larger world, and the direction of the country is often less pronounced."

Fisher laments that American Buddhists lack firebrand figures like the late Protestant peace activist William Sloane Coffin or Cornel West, the provocative public philosopher. Instead, Fisher said he often looks to politically active Buddhists in Thailand and Burma for inspiration.

In some Asian countries, Buddhist groups have developed deep ties to political parties. Soka Gakkai International, for instance, founded its own party in Japan the 1960s and maintains strong connections to the New Komeito Party. SGI-USA spokesman William Aiken said he doubts that such alliances would develop in the United States.

"In the American Soka Gakkai Buddhist community, we feel that to identify with one partisan political philosophy over another would limit our mission to support the Buddhist practice of a very diverse membership," he said.

Still, there are scores of politically engaged Buddhists in the United States -- even if they don't publicly identify their religion, said Aiken and other Buddhist leaders.

And while they remain small, there are several political Buddhist groups in the U.S. The Berkeley-based Buddhist Peace Fellowship, for example, was founded in 1978 by the late Robert Aitken Roshi, an American Zen leader.

In January, the Berkeley-based group will embark on a new campaign to encourage young Buddhists to connect their meditation practice and religious studies with "active nonviolence," said Katie Loncke, BPF's director of media and action. Just as important, she said, it will connect politically active Buddhists with each other.

"Many of us are out there looking and not knowing how to find each other."

Loncke said she is encouraged by the MindfulVOTES campaign, but also thinks Buddhists should address the root causes of suffering and societal injustice.

"Buddhism tends to get fuzzed into this kind of magical thinking -- that if you're mindful and you vote, then everything will get better,"

Loncke said. "But that shortcuts political education."

For Williams, the goal of MindfulVOTES this year is more immediate.

"We want people to take a breath," she said, "and realize that there is such as thing as Nov. 7."

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/06/buddhist-voters-bring-mindfulness-to-ballot-box_n_2079801.html

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Pulitzer Foundation Uses Buddhist Art To Bring Enlightenment To Ex-Cons In St. Louis

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St. Louis, Missouri (USA) -- The Buddha said, "I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering." The end of suffering is something that Keith Freeman -- a former drug dealer, convict, alcoholic and crack addict -- has been after for decades.

And after taking part in an intense, five-month program at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts that connected former prisoners and homeless veterans with ancient Buddhist artwork, Freeman thinks he may have taken a step closer to enlightenment.

The group is hosting 15 performances in the Pulitzer's galleries featuring rookie actors speaking scripts culled from their own group sessions as they wrestled with Buddhist truths and their own demons.

Growing up, Freeman's father was absent and his mother was often sick, so he raised his four younger brothers and sisters. But by the time he was 15, he had quit school, fallen in with the wrong crowd and was stealing from freight trains. By 17, he was locked up in the state penitentiary for a year. Before he was 30, he returned to prison, this time for selling drugs.

Freeman spent the next two decades in what he now can identify as a state of trishna, or craving for sense pleasures. Trishna is one of Buddhism's Noble Truths, and the source of all suffering, the source of self-annihilation.

"It was a battle between living and wanting," Freeman said. "I fought that battle for a long time."

Last year, he entered an outpatient drug program at the St. Patrick Center, a homeless service center in St. Louis. Last fall, caseworkers chose Freeman and 16 others who had auditioned for the Pulitzer's "Staging Reflections of the Buddha" program.

The original pool of actors was chosen for their willingness to open themselves up to something new, and to experience the vulnerability that comes with acting, said Emily Piro, who coordinated the "Staging" project for St. Patrick.

Emily Pulitzer, founder and director of the Pulitzer Foundation, said the project was conceived to "build bridges between audiences and art, and between parts of the community."

The goal, she said, was to teach the participants "how to articulate ideas, and how to trust."

Most of the participants are clients of the St. Patrick Center, but a few are veterans of St. Louis-based Prison Performing Arts. Another nonprofit group helps the actors with resumes and other job skills.

The Pulitzer Foundation's current exhibit, "Reflections of the Buddha" includes 22 Buddhist pieces from Afghanistan, China, India, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan and Tibet.

In the Pulitzer's galleries and classrooms, the actors meditated and wrote haiku. A series of game-playing and improv exercises fostered teamwork and communication skills.

The improv sessions led to the scripts the actors are performing for the public, as staffers sat nearby, furiously typing the actors' thoughts on laptops.

For many of the Christian and Muslim actors, the experience was their first exposure to 2,500-year-old Buddhist philosophies. Along the way, social workers tracked the sessions and met with the group separately to connect the dots between the art and the actors' lives.

The notes created during the improv games were then woven into scripts, which were reviewed for accuracy and given to the actors to memorize.

During the performances, the actors and audience move from one piece of artwork to the next -- a dynamic that Emily Pulitzer likens to a Passion play. As they lead an audience around the galleries, the actors will recite lines originally spoken by their colleagues in the improv sessions as they contemplated the pieces.

The performance "forces those who come ... to see the art from someone else's perspective," said Kristina Van Dyke, director of the Pulitzer Foundation. It's a "perspective they might not have heard before, and it forces them to see" former prisoners and homeless veterans in a different light.

Allen Wilson, 48, who lives in St. Louis and is a client at St. Patrick Center, said he wasn't sure what to think of the program at first.

"But as I came to understand what it was about, I've learned a lot about myself, the character in myself," Wilson said. "It gives you peace of mind when you can go to a different level and get a better awareness of yourself."

Christopher Fan, an intern with the "Staging" program from Washington University and a practicing Buddhist, said the actors had soaked up difficult Buddhist ideas. "In 12 weeks, they've gained more insight than I have in my 21 years as a Zen Buddhist," Fan said.

For Freeman, being exposed to Buddhism challenged him to worry less about the future. "It's about knowing not to give power to your burdens," he said. "When you do, it takes away from your soul."

Instead, he said, he's going to concentrate on his writing. He's got three screenplays already planned out in his head, and the combination of Buddhist philosophy and acting had taught him something about how he'd like to conduct the rest of his life.

"Put on my game face, stay in character and look forward," he said. "Backwards is not an option."

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Tim Townsend writes for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in St. Louis.

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