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Zen and the Art of

American Literature

Bernie Rhie

Department of English

Williams College Faculty Lecture Series

March 1, 2018

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ENGL 312: Zen and the Art of American Literature (Fall 2018 / Spring 2019)

In 1844, the Transcendentalist magazine, The Dial, published an excerpt from the Lotus Sutra, translated into English by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. It was the first English-language version of any Buddhist text to be published in the United States. At the time, very few Americans knew the first thing about what Buddhism was, but now, a little over a century and a half later, Buddhist ideas and practices seem ubiquitous (available even in the form of apps like Headspace and Calm). In this class, we’ll explore how Buddhism came to be the profoundly important cultural force in American life that it is today, looking particularly at the influence of Zen on American literature. We’ll read an array of Buddhist-influenced literary texts, from the Beat poetry of the 1950’s to novels like Middle Passage, A Tale for the Time Being, and Lincoln in the Bardo. But we’ll also range far beyond the world of literature into a variety of other cultural domains in which Buddhism has had a deep impact, like environmentalism and deep ecology, Western psychotherapy, and Western attitudes towards death and dying. We’ll also explore the role that Buddhism is playing in the fight against racism and racial injustice (from bell hooks to Black Lives Matter). And we’ll engage in an experiential investigation of the benefits of incorporating contemplative practices like meditation into the classroom: students in the course will learn a variety of meditation techniques, and we’ll spend 20-30 minutes each week practicing and reflecting upon those practices during class hours. Students will be expected to meditate outside of class as well (2-3 times per week) and keep a meditation journal. No prior experience with meditation is necessary. Just an open mind.

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Many friends and colleagues have given me wonderful suggestions as I’ve embarked on this new teaching and research project.

To all of you, thank you!

(Please keep the suggestions coming!)

Special thanks go to Jason Josephson Storm, Georges Dreyfus, James Manigault-Bryant, Seth Wax, Louisa Kania, and the members of the Williams College Meditation Group

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Sonoma Mountain Zen Center (Genjoji), Santa Rosa, CA

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SMZC Zendo

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SMZC Kitchen

My “Bible”

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Oryoki Meal Service During Sesshin (Intensive Retreat)

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Some Basic Types of Meditation Practice

  • Concentration (breath, koan, mantra)
  • Vipassana, insight, mindfulness
  • Cultivation of various qualities of heart and mind, like loving-kindness or gratitude

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Emptiness (Sunyata) in Buddhism

In Buddhist teaching, “emptiness” refers to a basic openness and non-separation that we experience when all small and fixed notions of our self are seen through or dissolved… The Buddha described human life as comprising a series of ever-changing processes: a physical process, a feeling process, a memory and recognition process, a thought and reaction process, and a consciousness process. These processes are dynamic and continuous, without a single element we can call our unchanging self… As our meditation practice deepens, we are able to see the movement of our experience. We note feelings and see that they last for only a few seconds. We pay attention to thoughts and see that they are ephemeral, that they come and go, uninvited, like clouds. We bring our awareness to the body and see that its boundaries are porous. In this practice, our sense of the solidity of a separate body or a separate mind starts to dissolve... As our meditation deepens still further we experience expansiveness, delight, and the freedom of our interconnectedness with all things, with the great mystery of our life.

-- Jack Kornfield, A Path With Heart (1993), p. 51

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Heart Sutra

Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, when deeply practicing prajña paramita, clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus relieved all suffering. Shariputra, form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form. Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form. Sensations, perceptions, formations, and consciousness are also like this. Shariputra, all dharmas are marked by emptiness; they neither arise nor cease, are neither defiled nor pure, neither increase nor decrease. Therefore, given emptiness, there is no form, no sensation, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind; no realm of sight ... no realm of mind consciousness. There is neither ignorance nor extinction of ignorance... neither old age and death, nor extinction of old age and death; no suffering, no cause, no cessation, no path; no knowledge and no attainment. With nothing to attain, a bodhisattva relies on prajña paramita, and thus the mind is without hindrance. Without hindrance, there is no fear. Far beyond all inverted views, one realizes nirvana. All buddhas of past, present, and future rely on prajña paramita and thereby attain unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment. Therefore, know the prajña paramita as the great miraculous mantra, the great bright mantra, the supreme mantra, the incomparable mantra, which removes all suffering and is true, not false. Therefore we proclaim the prajña paramita mantra, the mantra that says: "Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha." (Translation used by San Francisco Zen Center)

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Human Be-In, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, 1967.

Gary Snyder (left) and Allen Ginsberg (front center).

(1965)

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(← Allen Ginsberg!)

“Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

-- Timothy Leary (1966)

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Joshu's Dog (a koan)

A monk asked Joshu, a Chinese Zen master: "Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?"

Joshu answered: "Mu."

Mumon’s commentary (excerpts): To realize Zen one has to pass through the barrier of the patriarchs. Enlightenment always comes after the road of thinking is blocked… If you want to pass this barrier, you must work through every bone in your body, through every pore of your skin, filled with this question: What is Mu? and carry it day and night… If you really want to pass this barrier, you should feel like drinking a hot iron ball that you can neither swallow nor spit out… Just concentrate your whole energy into this Mu, and do not allow any discontinuation.

-- from The Gateless Gate (13th century)

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Philip Kapleau’s Enlightenment (Kensho) Experience

Threw myself into Mu for another nine hours with such utter absorption that I completely vanished… I didn’t eat breakfast, Mu did. I didn’t sweep and wash the floors after breakfast, Mu did. I didn’t eat lunch, Mu ate… Afternoon dokusan! … Hawklike, the roshi scrutinized me as I entered his room, walked toward him, prostrated myself, and sat before him with my mind alert and exhilarated… “The universe is One,” he began, each word tearing into my mind like a bullet. “The moon of Truth--” All at once the roshi, the room, every single thing disappeared in a dazzling stream of illumination and I felt myself bathed in a delicious, unspeakable delight… For a fleeting eternity I was alone -- I alone was… Then the roshi swam into view. Our eyes met and flowed into each other, and we burst out laughing… Returned to the main hall … I resumed my zazen, laughing, sobbing, and muttering to myself: “It was before me all the time, yet it took me five years to see it.” … Feel free as a fish swimming in an ocean of cool, clear water after being stuck in a tank of glue… and so grateful.

-- From Three Pillars of Zen, pp. 253-4

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Hume’s Bundle Theory of Personal Identity

There are some philosophers, who imagine we are every moment conscious of what we call our SELF… For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.

I may venture to affirm… that [the self is] nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement.

-- David Hume, “Of Personal Identity,”

A Treatise of Human Nature (1738)

(1991)

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In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.

-- Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé

(Epigraph to Part II of A Tale for the

Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, p. 109)

(2013)

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The nun held out her glasses, and Ruth, realizing that she’d left hers on the bedside table, took them… No, this wouldn’t do. The nun’s lenses were too thick and strong, smearing and dismantling the whole world as she knew it. She started to panic. She tried to pull the glasses from her face, but they were stuck there, and as she struggled, the smear of the world began to absorb her, swirling and howling like a whirlwind and casting her back into a place or condition that was unformed, that she couldn't find words for. How to describe it? Not a place, but a feeling, of nonbeing, sudden, dark, and prehuman, which filled her with such an inchoate horror that she cried out and brought her hands to her face, only to find that she longer had one. There was nothing there. No hands, no face, no eyes, no glasses, no Ruth at all. Nothing but a vast and empty ruthlessness... No up, no down. No past, no future. There was just this--this eternal sense of merging and dissolving into something unnameable that went on and on in all directions, forever. And then she felt something, a feather-light touch, and she heard something that sounded like a chuckle and a snap, and in an instant, her dark terror vanished and was replaced by a sense of utter calm and well-being… It was like being cradled in the arms of time itself...

-- Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being, pp. 122-3

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Heart Sutra

Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, when deeply practicing prajña paramita, clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus relieved all suffering. Shariputra, form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form. Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form. Sensations, perceptions, formations, and consciousness are also like this. Shariputra, all dharmas are marked by emptiness; they neither arise nor cease, are neither defiled nor pure, neither increase nor decrease. Therefore, given emptiness, there is no form, no sensation, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind; no realm of sight ... no realm of mind consciousness. There is neither ignorance nor extinction of ignorance... neither old age and death, nor extinction of old age and death; no suffering, no cause, no cessation, no path; no knowledge and no attainment. With nothing to attain, a bodhisattva relies on prajña paramita, and thus the mind is without hindrance. Without hindrance, there is no fear. Far beyond all inverted views, one realizes nirvana. All buddhas of past, present, and future rely on prajña paramita and thereby attain unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment. Therefore, know the prajña paramita as the great miraculous mantra, the great bright mantra, the supreme mantra, the incomparable mantra, which removes all suffering and is true, not false. Therefore we proclaim the prajña paramita mantra, the mantra that says: "Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha."

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Hermeneutics of Suspicion

… now nearly synonymous with criticism itself. (p. 124)

To apply a hermeneutics of suspicion is, I believe, widely understood as a mandatory injunction rather than a possibility among other possibilities. (p. 125)

(2003)

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Recognition in Literary Studies

… even as recognition pervades practices of reading and interpretation, theoretical engagement with recognition is hedged round with prohibitions and taboos, often spurned as unseemly, even shameful, seen as the equivalent of a suicidal plunge into unprofessional naiveté.

-- Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (2008), p. 26

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Recognition in Buddhism

recognition itself is an end as well as a means of Buddhist knowing. In many Mahāyāna manifestations especially, realization substantively means recognition--of the Buddha, the nature of mind… as not other than oneself.

-- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in the chapter on “Pedagogy,” p. 175. (Also published as “Pedagogy of Buddhism” in Touching Feeling, pp. 167-8)

(2005)

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Pushing for Enlightenment Experiences

A teacher may deliberately narrow and concentrate a student’s vision by instructing the student to work on a koan like Mu. But a person who is not emotionally ready for such an endeavor might do better to practice in a different way. Great care must be exercised; a premature enlightenment experience is not necessarily good… And even a person who is ready for such an experience may have to spend many years practicing with the bypassed levels of maturation, clearing them up.

Some teachers have had enormous experience with the advanced states, but not with the earlier levels. Sure they see. But that very vision, when not integrated firmly, can create mischief, not harmony and peace.

-- Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen (1989), pp. 35-6

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(1989)

(2008)

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Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

(2015)

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Growing up, I had never asked who I was. I was told who I was… I was told from a young age that my life was going to be a particular way because of my dark skin. And in fact I did experience the struggles of growing up as a black girl child. Based on what I experienced, I accepted the story of what was predetermined for black people, feeling completely destined for tragedy… Only in the deep silence of meditation did I begin to disbelieve that I was born only to suffer. Eventually after many years of sitting meditation, I recognized the root of my self-hatred, both external and internal, as a personal and collective denial or denigration of the body I inhabited… In the silence of meditation I could see that, in being an object of hatred, I lived my life as an object of everything and everyone...This was not life.

-- Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness:

Awakening Through Race, Sexuality, and Gender, pp. 23-4

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Emptiness refers to an open and uncluttered heart with regard to nature or form… When we can hold “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” in this way, seeing that it points as much to form as it does to emptiness, then we will no longer relate to race, sexuality, and gender as weighty burdens but as sources for awakening as the places in which its mystery unfolds.

-- Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness, pp. 105-6

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Spiritual “Colorblindness”

Within many Buddhist communities, discussions of difference gravitate toward a superficial sameness or “no self”, without realistically addressing the suffering that has happened--that is happening--among human beings. Such suffering, when explored in Buddhist communities, is treated as a personal issue rather than as a collective injury.

-- Zenju Earthlyn Manuel,

The Way of Tenderness, p. 47

(2016)

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Consciousness, Dualism, and Racism

“... They think settin’ me adrift will solve everythin’? Hah! I’m not the problem… Man is the problem, Mr. Calhoun… anythin’ capable of thought Conflict is what it means to be conscious. Dualism is a bloody structure of the mind. Subject and object, perceiver and perceived, self and other--these ancient twins are built into mind like the stem-piece of a merchantman. We cannot think without them, sir. And what, pray, kin such a thing mean? Only this, Mr. Calhoun: They are signs of a transcendental Fault, a deep crack in consciousness itself. Mind was made for murder. Slavery, if you think this through, forcing yourself not to flinch, is the social correlate of a deeper, ontic wound.”

-- Charles Johnson, Middle Passage, pp. 97-8

(1998)

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I think when there are laws on the books that are so hateful, of course our first instinct is to get rid of those laws, transform those laws, reform those laws. But there’s something much deeper inside of us that causes our behavior to be biased or discriminatory. And to me, racism is a sickness. If we’re approaching racism and sexism and homophobia as sicknesses, you’re not just gonna think, “Well, if someone writes standards over and over again, “I will no longer be racist, I will no longer be racist,” that it’s going to change them. No, it takes something else. It takes a sort of exorcism. I deeply believe that.

-- Patrisse Cullors, in conversation with Krista Tippett and Robert Ross (2016)

(https://onbeing.org/programs/patrisse-cullors-and-robert-ross-the-spiritual-work-of-black-lives-matter-may2017/)

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But even in death he seemed to be doing something, or perhaps should I say he squeezed out one final cry wherethrough I heard a cross wind of sounds just below his breathing. A thousand soft undervoices that jumped my jangling senses from his last, weakly syllabled wind to a mosaic of voices within voices, each one immanent in the other, none his but all strangely his, the result being that as the loathsome creature, this [Allmuseri] deity from the dim beginnings of the black past, folded my father back into the broader, shifting field--as waves vanish into water--his breathing blurred in a dissolution of sounds and I could only feel that identity was imagined; I had to listen harder to isolate him from the We that swelled each particle and pore of him, as if the (black) self was the greatest of all fictions; and then I could not find him at all. He seemed everywhere, his presence, and that of countless others, in me as well as the chamber, which had subtly changed... Then I fainted. Or died... A long, long interval passed in the most unimaginable quietude. Silence as deep, as pervading as the depths of the sea.

-- Charles Johnson, Middle Passage, pp. 171-2

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Aaron Goggans (BLM DC)

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Three Pillars of the Great Turning

(Joanna Macy)

  • Holding Actions (BLOCK): blockades, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of refusal… Buying time.
  • Structural Changes (BUILD): actively building new societal forms, new economies, new ways of being together.
  • Shifts in Consciousness (BE): the work of inner spiritual and psychological transformation. According to Macy: structural alternatives cannot take root and survive without deeply ingrained values to sustain them… They require, in other words, a profound shift in our perception of reality--a cognitive revolution and spiritual awakening.

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Aaron Goggans (far left), Buddhist Peace Fellowship Co-Director Katie Loncke (second from left) and other meditation practitioners at Flowering Lotus Meditation and Retreat Center, in Magnolia, Mississippi

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Black Lives Matter DC is a radical collective of Black artists, infrastructure builders, and movement healers and strategists from the future, organizing in the here and now around two movement equations. These equations inform how we live as our highest selves while dismantling White Supremacy, Patriarchy, Capitalism, Imperialism, and the role the state plays in supporting them...

The second side of this equation is one we have borrowed from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship that helps us frame the way we integrate healing with organized resistance… Building + Blocking + Being…

BLM programs that BUILD include: M4BL DC Steering Committee, Black Organizer Dinners, Emotional Emancipation Circles, #KeepDC4ME, Black Joy Sunday, and Re-Envisioning Masculinity Workshops.

BLM programs that BLOCK include: Direct Actions (occupations, highway shutdowns, disruptions, blockades etc.), Nonprofit Accountability Campaigns, and Weeks of Action.

BLM programs that sustain and elevate our BE include: Emotional Emancipation Circles, Men of Color Consciousness Building Groups, Black Joy Sunday, Black Organizer Dinners, Visioning Sessions, and Well-Examined Life Analysis Building. (https://blacklivesmatter.com/chapter/blm-dc/)

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Movement

Meditation Mondays

BLM DC Healing House

This class will focus on trauma informed movement experiences to maintain peace, grounding, mindfulness and self-awareness as an everyday self-care practice. Participants will engage in movement involving deep breathing, centering techniques, meditation, stretching, aromatherapy, guided imagery and self-affirmations.

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I am walking away from the law. I’ve resigned my position as a law professor at Ohio State University, and I’ve decided to teach and study at a seminary. Why? … Solving the crises we face isn’t simply a matter of having the right facts, graphs, policy analyses, or funding. And I no longer believe we can “win” justice simply by filing lawsuits, flexing our political muscles or boosting voter turnout. Yes, we absolutely must do that work, but none of it — not even working for some form of political revolution — will ever be enough on its own. Without a moral or spiritual awakening, we will remain forever trapped in political games fueled by fear, greed and the hunger for power. American history teaches how these games predictably play out within our borders: Time and again, race gets used as the Trump Card, a reliable means of dividing, controlling and misleading the players so a few can win the game. This is not simply a legal problem, or a political problem, or a policy problem. At its core, America’s journey from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration raises profound moral and spiritual questions about who we are, individually and collectively, who we aim to become, and what we are willing to do now.

-- Michelle Alexander, Facebook post, September 15, 2016

(https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1090233291064627&id=168304409924191)

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The Practice of the Wild

My own path is a kind of old time Buddhism... Respect for all living beings is a basic part of that tradition. I have tried to teach others how to meditate and enter into the wild areas of the mind “The world,” with the exception of a tiny bit of human intervention, is ultimately a wild place. It is that side of our being which guides our breath and our digestion, and when observed and appreciated is a source of deep intelligence… The Practice of the Wild suggests that we engage in more than environmentalist virtue, political keenness, or useful and necessary activism. We must ground ourselves in the dark of our deepest selves... Self-realization, even enlightenment, is another aspect of our wildness -- a bonding of the wild in ourselves to the (wild) processes of the universe.

-- Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (1990/2010), p. x

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Faculty Book Discussion Group

Oakley Center, Summer 2018

Email me at brhie@williams.edu

if you’re interested in taking part!

Williams Secular Community

Dinner discussion: on the use of contemplative practices in secular educational institutions. All are welcome!

Tuesday, March 6, 6pm Paresky 112

Contact: Coly Elhai ‘19

(cle4@williams.edu)

(2013)

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If you care about the present and future state of education in the U.S., please come to this screening/discussion! It’s especially important to have college teachers and administrators involved.

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If you’d like to see any of these slides again, the entire Google Slides presentation is available at:

www.tinyurl.com/BernieFacultyLecture

Thank you for being here!

If you’d like to contact me, my email address is brhie@williams.edu

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Bonus Slides

What follows are slides that I decided to cut from my presentation for the sake of time. If any of them pique your interest, and you’d like to ask me about them, please feel free to write me at brhie@williams.edu.

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World’s Parliament of Religions, 1893, Chicago, IL

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Soyen Shaku

Okakura Kakuzō

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Shunryu Suzuki

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Angel Kyodo Williams

Pema Chödrön

Joan Halifax

Sharon Salzberg

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Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (front left, with the shaved head) at the Human Be-In, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, 1967.

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Quantum mechanics plays a big role in A Tale for the Time Being. If you don’t know much about quantum mechanics, this NOVA episode will help. It’s mind-blowing!

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The mindfulness practices cultivate the ability to surrender into the moment, and they elasticize the sense of self by emphasizing its inherent fluidity… To reach this point requires not the obliteration of ego but the development of mental faculties beyond those that are conventionally accepted as adequate for “normal” functioning. The progress of meditation is one route to such development. Freud lamented in his paper “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” that psychoanalysis by itself was unable to produce an ego strong and versatile enough to accomplish his therapeutic goals. By working directly with the metaphorical experience of self, meditation offers a complementary method of ego development, one that fills in the gap that Freud was left struggling with.

-- Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective (1995), pp. 155-6

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It was only later, after years of studying and irregularly practicing Buddhism, as well as years of utilizing such artmaking methods, that I realized that using those methods is as egoic as other ways of making artworks -- that, in short, there are no shortcuts to “enlightenment”... an understanding of a self -- even though the term is ultimately meaningless--is only attained by working through what each of us thinks of as “my self,” not by attempting to evade or abolish it…

-- Jackson Mac Low, 2001 Lecture, “My Writingways”

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(2013)

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… my feminist students can be politically aware of issues and have “mastered” feminist theory, but nevertheless struggle with eating disorders, low self-esteem, poor body image, and abusive relationships. What is worse, they often think they “should know better,” and so use feminism to beat themselves up for “succumbing” to those cultural pressures. I began to wonder what was missing -- what Women’s Studies, and higher education as a whole, needed to do differently in order to extend the intellectual empowerment students feel through feminism to deeper, more integrated levels.

-- Beth Berlia, Director of Women’s Studies at St. Cloud University,

quoted in Contemplative Practices in Higher Ed, p. 83

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Economics is often defined as the study of the allocation of scarce resources. But “scarcity” doesn’t simply exist: it is produced by the interaction of our wanting and what exists or is produced, viz. the interaction of demand and supply. Hence, the fundamental economic problem is the management of the tension between what is produced and our desiring, our wanting. At the core of the study of economics and the systems that arise from it is an inquiry into the nature of our wanting.

-- Daniel Barbezat, Professor of Economics at Amherst College

(URL: http://www.contemplativemind.org/archives/1517)

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Scenario 4. Choose between 2 alternatives:

  • The class is randomly divided into 2 groups, 1 and 2. You are a member of group 1. All members of groups 1 and 2 get $100 each.
  • The class is randomly divided into two groups, 1 and 2. You are a member of group 1. Members of group 1 get $100 and members of group 2 get $200.

Which do you choose?

-- From Contemplative Practices in Higher Education, p. 62

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Scenario 4. Choose between 2 alternatives:

  • The class is randomly divided into 2 groups, 1 and 2. You are a member of group 1. All members of groups 1 and 2 get $100 each.
  • The class is randomly divided into two groups, 1 and 2. You are a member of group 1. Members of group 1 get $100 and members of group 2 get $200.

Which do you choose?

One might predict that almost everyone would select option B. However, when I have done this in my class and with other groups, between 40 and 60 percent say that they would select option A...

-- From Contemplative Practices in Higher Education, p. 62

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Scenario 4. Choose between 2 alternatives:

  • The class is randomly divided into 2 groups, 1 and 2. You are a member of group 1. All members of groups 1 and 2 get $100 each.
  • The class is randomly divided into two groups, 1 and 2. You are a member of group 1. Members of group 1 get $100 and members of group 2 get $200.

Which do you choose?

After being led through a guided metta-like meditation focused on the cultivation of gratitude, students (40-60% of whom originally selected option A) are presented with this scenario again, and nearly every student selects option B.

-- From Contemplative Practices in Higher Education, p. 62

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Buddhism, Death, and Dying