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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South Korea's Buddhists monks tackle modern challenges

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South Korea's Buddhists monks tackle modern challenges

Seoul, South Korea -- Sitting in the study at Seoul's main Jogyesa Temple, the Venerable Sung Jin wraps his wide grey tunic around him, as his round face cracks into a broad smile.

<< South Korean Buddhists march with lanterns during the Lotus Lantern Festival in downtown Seoul, 19 May 2012 Buddhist communities have been holding events to try to engage the public

Twenty years ago, he tells me, he was a student activist in South Korea's turbulent new democracy. Running from police one day after a demonstration, he took refuge in a temple, and began chatting to the Zen master there.

The rest, as they say, is history: Ven Sung Jin is now head of administration at the Jogyesa Temple.

But the question of why people become monks is a pertinent one in South Korea at the moment.

Last month, the country's main Jogye Order was hit by scandal after video footage showed several of its monks drinking, smoking and gambling in a hotel bedroom.

It was a PR disaster for South Korea's ancient national religion, already struggling to remain relevant in the face of thriving Christianity and capitalism.

Allegations of un-Buddhist-like behaviour - gambling, corruption, even paying for sex - have circled the Joyge Order, fuelled by internal divisions over the organisation's leadership.

The man who leaked the recent video footage, Ven Seong-Ho, told me the order was like "a patient with cancer - it's about to die, and we don't have the doctors who can fix it".

Many South Koreans dismiss that as hyperbole. But the recent scandal has raised new questions about the role Buddhist monks play in modern-day Korea.

Interest declining

In an age of sex, smartphones and social freedoms, what motivates people to give up many of life's pleasures and spend their lives isolated from the world in quiet contemplation?

"There's usually a moment," the smiling, accidental Ven Sung Jin told me. "A turning point, when someone decides to become a monk.

"It could be house burning down, the death of a loved one. A moment when they realise that nothing lasts forever. It's a very personal response."

But, he says, the number of people making that choice has declined.

"Compared to when I became a monk," he said, "there's been a reduction of maybe 50-70% in people coming in."

"I mean, look at this!" He holds up his bat-like sleeves.

"When life is so convenient, when there's so much to enjoy in modern life, why would you want to shave your head, wear clothes like this, and spend time with a 70-year-old Zen master in the mountains?"

Ven Sung Jin spend ten years meditating in a temple in South Korea's mountains, before moving to Seoul.

"Few want to bear the great responsibility of being a monk," he says, "when even the smallest mistakes have huge consequences."

Korea's Buddhist monks sign up for life - something that can create added pressures, says Ven Moo-Shim, an American who's lived here as a monk for almost 30 years.

"People have a different attitude about Buddhism in Korea," he told me. "For example, in Thailand, you can go to be a monk for 3-6 months, and then return to society. But in Korea it's not that simple. Korean people believe you have to give your life to it. So when they see monks squabbling over petty things, they feel sad."

'Feisty'

As a result of the recent scandal, the leaders of the Jogye Order announced 100 days of repentance, and a series of reforms designed to bar monks from running the financial or day-to-day affairs of temples without help.

Bringing in financial advisors to do the accounts, they said, would not only prevent wrong-doing, but would confine the monks to their key tasks of meditation and spiritual practice.

But it's not the first time scandal has hit South Korea's main Buddhist order. Just over a decade ago, TV pictures showed monks rioting in Seoul, over internal conflicts within the order itself.

I asked the American Ven Moo-Shim whether Korean monks' reputation for being a bit hot-blooded was deserved.

"They are a bit feisty," he said. "And part of that reputation is that they're willing to fight for what they believe is truly good, and helps the Korean people. But of course if things like this recent scandal carry on, they'll lose that good image."

During earlier Japanese and Chinese invasions of Korea, the monks came out of their monasteries to fight the invaders. But with no military invasion to head off in 21st century South Korea, how does a closeted, meditative order remain relevant now?

"I think it's facing a challenge," says Moo-Shim, "because Buddhism is trying to satisfy a need for scientific learning. But trying to adjust the needs of Buddhism to the needs of this age is not so easy."

There have been attempts, he says, to combine Buddhist teaching with counselling, and to hold street festivals and cultural events to engage the public.

But he says, at the same time "we as monks have to recognise that not everyone's ready to live like we do. And it's the monastic mind that's very interesting to a lot of people."

Ven Sung Jin agrees. Buddhism was banned and repressed in Korea for centuries, and it still survived, he said.

"The decision to become a monk isn't something that can be blown off course too easily," he says. It's about wanting to fill the empty mind.

And for someone to be affected by the recent events? "I don't think they would have been willing to take that decision in the first place."

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Adaptive Buddhist viewpoint relevant to modern world

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There are some lessons to be learned from a former Buddhist monk about nudging religion into the modern world, writes Ian Harris.

Otago, New Zealand -- Understanding religion from a secular viewpoint, without assuming any hotline to heaven, is the approach which many cutting-edge Christian thinkers take today. They are not abandoning their 2000-year heritage, but trying to give it substance in a vastly changed world.

And they are not alone. Some adherents of an even older tradition are on a parallel track, as became clear during the visit to New Zealand last month of a former Buddhist monk, Scottish-born Stephen Batchelor.

Author of seven books on Buddhism, Mr Batchelor has steeped himself in the diverse Buddhist traditions of Tibet, Korea and South-east Asia. Each of those cultures adapted the Buddha's teaching to fit their own times and circumstances, but Mr Batchelor does not identify with any of them.

Instead, he is bent on nudging Buddhism into the modern secular world. In this he has been strongly influenced by liberal Protestant thinkers of the past 70 years who have been pioneering a new path for Christianity.

"I found in them both the inspiration for a living transformation of religious tradition, and an example of it," he says.

For example, where scholars of the Jesus Seminar in the United States set most store on texts from the earliest years of the Christian era, Mr Batchelor goes back to Pali texts (a variety of Sanskrit) closest to Siddhartha Gautama, who lived some 450 years before Jesus. When the texts are studied in their ancient Jewish or Indian settings they reveal more clearly the original teachings of the founders of their faiths.

There are other parallels. Jesus the Christ (or anointed one) and Gautama the Buddha (or one who has awoken) are worshipped as God by millions of their followers. Secular-oriented scholars say they were never divine beings, but entirely human.

That frees both Jesus and Gautama to be re-imagined for our own time and place. Released from the elaborate theological and institutional structures built upon their memory, they emerge as men of extraordinary vision and insight.

Over centuries the teachings of Gautama and Jesus about a new way of life morphed into belief systems, but today their original emphasis is being increasingly affirmed.

There is obviously a tension here between loyalty to the tradition and responsibility to the future. Mr Batchelor fears the attempt to preserve the tradition intact is condemning it to irrelevance.

"The difference between modernity and the traditional Asian forms of Buddhism is now so great that in a secular world it is necessary to leave behind the belief system and move towards a way of living," he says.

"Belief-based religion is basically about consolation. It not only explains everything, but also shows how to achieve some sort of salvation - nirvana in Buddhism, heaven in Christianity. Putting the emphasis on pursuing a way of life in the here and now changes the dynamics completely."

Which explains why Buddhists seeking a credible modern faith are rejecting belief in reincarnation, while among Christians the classic creeds and rituals are losing their potency.

Meditation is so closely associated with Buddhism that in the West it has cornered the meditation market. Mr Batchelor sees a danger in that: it could reduce the ideal of cultivating the whole personality to a self-improvement technique. A religious culture cuts deeper than that.

The goals of Christianity and Buddhism - freedom grounded in love, integrity, mindfulness of the whole of life, and the courage to be fully the people we can be - also overlap.

And for secular Buddhists like Mr Batchelor, the gold is not the goal but the path they are on. Traditionally, the nirvana of bliss and inner peace is achieved through release from the cycle of death and rebirth. His modern expression of this is the stopping of deep habits of mind to cultivate another way of living, releasing people from being determined by their instinctual drives.

"That stopping is nirvana, even when it occurs only momentarily. It is an inner awakening, the resonance of the Buddha within."

Christians will see a parallel here with the apostle Paul's concept of the Christ within, a life-centred symbol of love, grace and transformation.

Mr Batchelor thinks an evolving Buddhism can learn from Christianity - and an evolving Christianity can learn from Buddhism, especially by recovering the contemplative tradition that was once so prominent in the churches.

The imaginative adaptation of both religions offers a philosophy, ethic, psychology and way of life that embraces all aspects of existence without the need to appeal to any supernatural order of being.

That will be a step too far for many, but for others a refreshing new prospect.

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