Upaya?

One of the pleasures of teaching at The New School is students from Parsons School of Design who think in creatively different ways. This is the fruit of the final presentation by a student who had undertaken to explore why Jewish people are drawn to Buddhism and was supposed to share some of her findings and process. Instead, or as the presentation, she had her classmates gather around a table and told us we were going to create a mandala for our class. She gave each of us a piece of clay which we were to shape any way we wanted and then add to the "mandala" growing on a piece of crinkled foil. Before next week's (final) class she will fire it in a kiln, and bring it back with paints for us to add color. Everyone was enraptured but I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Perhaps as we apply colors next week she'll share thoughts from the paper version of the project:

Buddhism through its life has expanded far beyond the location of its conception underneath the Bodhi tree. While directionally, Buddhism moved through China toward Japan through the interconnectivity of the Silk Roads, as modernization grew and [given] the diasporic fate of the Jewish people, Buddhism’s journey toward the West has found refuge in the minds of many contemporary American Jews. An aspect of the unique quality of Buddhism is its capacity to preserve preexisting faith and cultures by enriching the practitioner’s devotion rather than using means of destruction or conversion.

While it's unorthodox to think of Buddhism as "finding refuge" rather than offering it, it makes a kind of sense of our clay concoction. Perhaps my student is a JewBu bodhisattva?

[Update 12/17: Our bodhisattva wasn't able to come to class, as someone she had come in contact with had tested positive for covid, so our mandalizing was interrupted. Or maybe a deeper Dharma saw a chance to remind us that in samsara everything is transitory!]