8:02pm, 14th St at Union Square

Official last day of the academic year (makeup for the two Tuesday snow days). Since my "Sacred Mountains" class had plenty of extracurricular activities, we didn't need it. Farewell, AY 2016-17, a year in which I taught quite the range of courses in quite the range of formats: an upper level and an introductory religious studies seminar (Theorizing Religion and Not To Scale: On Sacred Mountains), a university lecture course (Who New? A History of The New School, with my friend J), a seminar-turned-independent study (Exploring Religious Ethics: Confucianism in Dialogue), an advising tutorial (Buddhism as a Liberal Art), a conference tutorial (Mountains and Sacred Landscapes) and the Dean's Honor Symposium. Whew!

Delayed action

My advising tutorial "Buddhism as a Liberal Art" ended today as sweetly as it began. Because of interruptions from holidays and the crater of the election it's a little hard to believe we met ten times: that many? On the other hand, it feels like we've been meeting much longer: only ten?

Perhaps sweet isn't the word. Gathered as a group for the last time, our minds turned to ultimate things. The theme for our final discussion, I'd told the class, was how one might get whatever we've been getting out of our time together in settings other than this. I primed things with a question from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's essay "Pedagogy of Buddhism":

Is it true that we can learn only when

we are aware we are being taught? 

(I found it in Donovan Schaefer's Religious Affects, a book I picked up at AAR; another work of Sedgwick's - the chapter "Pedagogy" from Critical Terms for Buddhist Studies - was actually my suggestion for this final class, before we put the syllabus aside!)

I thought we'd talk about how we learn to put ourselves in the way of new experiences, discoveries, knowledge - but also how hard it is to do. (I was thinking of Dewey's sense that education usually closes down people's curiosity.) But the sense in the room was that the idea Sedgwick was floating is not only not true, but backwards. We learn best when we are not aware of it, one student protested, let alone aware of being taught! From this it was a short distance to how one learns better outside of school, just living one's life. Suddenly the classroom came to seem the least promising place for learning to happen! Another student admitted that she'd figured out a few years ago that she could fake her way through the requirements of classes, and hadn't really been learning since. By "learning" she meant something more than performing well in class, including making good marks. You might say that, weary of playing the good student, she had come to our advising tutorial is search of liberating arts she wasn't finding at our liberal arts school.

(Make sure to look here)

I inquired what learning felt like, and we agreed that it was the falling into place of something you'd encountered before but hadn't got, what my lamented teacher Victor Preller called "the penny drops." We might have concluded that liberal arts plants seeds which sprout as your life unfolds but that seemed a little pat. The student's sense of faking it in classes raised a deeper worry, closer to Dewey's concerns but raised here about a pedagogy which claims to be Deweyan! (Her department, Interdisciplinary Science, is energetic in its commitment to "discovery science" and social justice-inflected pedagogy.) To what extent can the very intentionality of a well-constructed learning experience neuter its capacity to be truly transformative, permitting - even perhaps promoting - faking it? Is engaged, problem-solving pedagogy perhaps too earnest for the playful openness learning sometimes inhabits? Or is any "school" setting too contrived to connect deeply with a student's real life to occasion genuine growth?

Tough questions, but there was a palpable pleasure in being able to name them. And, folks reflected, that only happens in settings like this one! This wasn't quite what I was after, but of course it was gratifying. And I trust seeds were sown which will ripen in unexpected times and ways later. Although in many ways different than I expected (and very different from the last time), I dare say "Buddhism as a Liberal Art" was successful. I know I learned a lot...! I'll miss our gatherings.

Election mandala

How do you teach during the week of an election like this? Well, for Wednesday's class, encouraged by my co-teacher's gift of prescience, we planned a counterfactual exercise: Suppose Trump had won last night, how would you, as a citizen of The New School, respond? For tomorrow's, which happens in the afternoon before results come in, we'll go through the motions; by unplanned happenstance, the theme is ritual.

But today, in "Buddhism as a Liberal Art," I tried to give each of us a store of peace to weather the upcoming emotional storms... or was it to slow down time? We did something I've done before, took a Thich Nhat Hanh-inspired slow silent group walk around the block. Last time it was Spring, and took twenty minutes. Today night was falling over autumnal scenes, and, with a different person taking charge of the pace for each of the sides of the block between 11th and 10th Streets, Fifth and Sixth Avenues, it took the better part of an hour! It felt like more, and less.

As we made our way clockwise around the block, people and cars passing ever more swiftly but gently by, it didn't take long for me to realize that we were on a sort of kora. Distracted by the streetscape I didn't say it then but I'll say it now: Om mani padme hum.

Ebb and flow

Nice little moment in "Buddhism as a Liberal Art" today.

STUDENT 1

I remember hearing in a dharma talk

that nothing is pure or impure.

STUDENT 2

[misunderstanding]

That reminds me of something the Dalai Lama said,

that adding a little dirt to the ocean 

doesn't make the ocean dirty, just as ... 

STUDENT 2

[understanding]

... adding a little soap wouldn't make the ocean clean. 

Beautiful questions

This was the view over Union Square when I came out of "Buddhism as a Liberal Art" today. It isn't that often that the clouds you see through the streets of New York give a sense of vastness and distance, but they did today. I was with my friend H, a mindfulness teacher who'd visited the class and led us in a wonderful discussion. In our ninety minutes together, he had us introduce ourselves multiple times - in pairs, threes, and to the group, each time answering a different question: What was your intention in coming today? What's your interior weather like? What are three things you're curious about? Write down three questions. Which one of these would you like to share with the whole group? Before we knew it, our time was up, but oh how much we'd learned about each other - and about ourselves.

I like introductions, H said, because they help me learn who I am in each moment. Indeed he explained the point of each of the questions, which he described as "practices." Knowing your intentions is key because "everything happens as it's intended" - as your intentions allow it to be. Knowing your interior weather helps you take care of yourself, but also reminds you how changeable you - and everyone else - are. And when we shared our questions, H had us consider the way we asked them, what we were really asking. A poet he had heard had asked "Do you want to lead a beautiful life?" and answered "Ask beautiful questions." Seamlessly H wrapped up with elegant accounts of Buddhism and liberal arts as both concerned with this questioning, this attentiveness to self and others. It was beautiful.

My three questions, incidentally, were: Is liberal arts really as valuable as we say? What is age? How much has the world already changed beyond what I think I know? 

A peel of Buddhism

The first session of "Buddhism as a liberal art" went nicely, I think. I started, yes, by passing around a basket of tangerines, and later had the class read Thich Nhat Hanh's "How to eat a tangerine," then wordlessly passed the basket around again. (These are the skins of my thoughtlessly consumed and, below, slightly more mindfully absorbed fruits.)

The six students seemed happy to find out this wasn't a regular class (although several had come for, and could clearly use, some Intro to Buddhism; that can be arranged). But the main object of "tutorial advising" is having an extended conversation about what matters, how we live, and how our liberal arts experiences can contribute - something which happens too infrequently in our busy collegiate lives. All were excited at this prospect. Me too!

Buddhism as a liberal art

I have a third course this semester. An "Advising tutorial," it gathers a small group of students (seven) for ten discussions around education and vocation, offering intensive advising and an academic credit. I offered a version of this as one of the pilots of this program - called "Buddhism and Liberal Arts" - and had a blast. This time someone mistyped my title, and I decided to go with the new one.

Discussing readings is not central in an advising tutorial, and everything will in any case depend on what kind of interests and background the students bring, but for starters I've assembled these readings. (I'm happy to send proper details.) A significant number, I realized with some surprise, are things I discovered in Tricycle magazine.

Thich Nhat Hanh, “Eating a tangerine,” “Action precepts” 

Daniel Fallon, “On the past, present, and future of the liberal arts” 

Sid Brown, A Buddhist in the classroom, excerpt 

Reginald Ray, “The Vajrayana journey is an experience of love, power and freedom” 

“The Bodhisattva Vow: eight views” 

Gary Gutting, “What is college for?” 

Lodro Rinzler, Sebene Selassie, Lama Rod Owens and Qalvy Grainzvolt, “Buddhism in the next generation” 

Hsiao-Lan Hu, This-worldly nibbâna, excerpt 

Georges Dreyfus, The sound of two hands clapping, excerpt 

Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “We are not one” 

Alice Walker, “Suffering too insignificant for the majority to see” 

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Pedagogy” 

Cynthia Thatcher, “What’s so great about now?”

We start tomorrow as we did last time - with tangerines!

Coming soon to a college near you!

Buddhisty stuff

Come the Fall, I'll be teaching three courses. One will be a new take on New School history. The other two, repeats/updates, will be where I process my China experience. For "Theorizing Religion" this will obviously be so. But I'm also repeating the "advising tutorial" I piloted in Spring 2013, "Buddhism and Liberal Arts" (B&LA) a not-quite-course designed to help a small group of students reflect on and take ownership of their educations and vocations. How might my China year affect it? I had few discussions of "liberal arts" there. And except for tourism, as during Longhua's shuilu rite in November or the Datong expedition last month Buddhism pretty much fell off the radar screen entirely. 

I think it's good for me to admit this. Buddhism in contemporary China is associated with wealth, with old temples being rebuilt and big opulent new temples being built throughout the land. An article I found about shuilu described a contemporary Buddhism which caters to lay people's desire for showy rituals rather than dharma talks, and one whose priests are less likely to be meditators than to choose that line of business to become wealthy (perhaps leaving after a few years to get married). I know that's not the whole story, but it's the one I heard from non-Buddhists, and somehow I never found my way beyond them. 

To some extent, I'm sorry to say, I reacted the way many a western Buddhophile reacts to the lived Buddhism of Asia - distaste and shock at what seems a samsaric comfort with wealth and power, and an encouragement of karmic calculations and superstitious devotions. I'm sorry to say it because I recognized it but did nothing about it. I reminded myself that the western image of Buddhist otherworldliness is an accident, an artifact of its peripheral position in our societies; that lay meditation is a modern departure from practically all historic religious traditions (not to mention a bourgeois self-indulgence); and that western religious traditions past and present, too, are waist-deep in the demands of real people's real lives. Buddhism in China, as everywhere it's been important, has been many things to many people.

B&LA was going to need an overhaul anyway. My "Buddhism and Modern Thought" course of Spring 2014 made me reflect on and take ownership of Buddhism's involvement with political power along with the legitimacy and inevitability of what's known as Buddhist modernism. The original B&LA was a Zennish rumination on getting beyond "dualities" which bedevil thinking about education and vocation: school/life, study/practice, contemplation/activism, personal/political,

spontaneity/discipline, self/nonself, and path/destination. That still seems helpful... we'll see.

In the meantime, I've been reconnecting with my Buddhist modernist self - you know, the one with all the Buddhist stuff in his apartment, who gives himself little dharma talks from time to time. (Perhaps I should just call myself a 文化佛教徒, a cultural Buddhist.) Consider, for instance, that I had forgotten what most of the stuff in my apartment is, and that over the past year that stuff has been used, moved around and sometimes broken by people I've never met; I was apprehensive about returning to survey the damage... A great opportunity for non-attachment, not to mention cleaning house!

Or so I thought. But the minute I rediscovered things, from forgotten clothes to not so attractive dishes I brought back from Japan ages ago, clinging snapped right back in place. (The apprehension was just the clinging coiled for return.) Indeed they've been insisting on being restored to their old places. I sometimes think about objects having lives of their own, but here it's clear that this is all about me. I'm working on it, a little. I'm pushing back at the neurotic recreation of what was, after all, a largely accidental array... or at least appreciating it as a largely accidental array, which might, accidentally, endure for a bit longer (or a lot longer) until some new accident happens. I want the new accidents, and the openness to them.

I'm not sure that makes any sense at all. There's probably nothing "Buddhist" about the predictable ambivalence accompanying any return from travel, especially a long sojourn like the one I've just completed. One wants to be the same person who left and also to be a new, different person, wants to come to some sort of terms with how (shockingly!) easily one left the old and with how (shockingly!) easily one now slides back into it...

I leave you with some pictures I took on the N Train crossing the Manhattan Bridge back to Brooklyn this afternoon. I was trying to get the view of Brooklyn Bridge, East River and Southern Manhattan - including the new tower where WTC once stood, but the Manhattan Bridge wasn't having it, though I snapped away with abandon. When looking for the least obstructed view in iPhoto I realized that the obstructions are interesting, too - notice how they're torqued by the camera! - and that the obstructedness was part of the view.

Growth

Ah, Saturdays in Brooklyn - I'm going to miss you! Today I went from the farmer's market (where I made a contribution to "textile recycling") to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Expecting (actually dreading) the uniform green of summer I was delighted to find blooming rosebay (a rhododendron native to the eastern North America), irises, mountain laurel, extravagances of little roses and the splendid red display below. From there it was on to the Brooklyn Museum for coffee, a glimpse of Clarissa Dalloday (a Woolfian riposte to Bloomsday), and a stroll through the wonderful American collection. Nice neighborhood I live in!

This was braided with work on an essay I'm finishing on teaching comparative religious ethics. It's based on my AAR paper last year  - our panel on teachingreligious ethics is becoming a special section in a journal! Somewhat awkwardly, though, I find my thinking has changed.

The paper
is called "Wider Moral Communities," but about "Exploring Religious Ethics," which traversing Buddhist and Christian traditions. Yet because of "Buddhism and Modern Thought," along with the enduring questions of "Buddhism and Liberal Arts," my understanding of Buddhist ethics has deepened. Hsiao-Lan Hu's account of anattā (non-Self) as the flip-side of pratītya samutpāda (interdependent co-arising) is central to the change, I think. Will I incorporate this new understanding in the paper? I can't, really. For one thing, there's a respondent, who's expecting my paper to be basically the same as the one she responded to in November. For another, I'm not sure where this will lead - an ethics without selves!?

New questions and old

Had a quite fascinating conversation with a colleague who studies education today. My head is still abuzz with the miracle that was "Buddhism and Modern Thought" so it was nice to have a chance to reflect on it, and to reconnect with broader questions of pedagogy and liberal arts - the objects of her work. It's always nice to have a conversation like this, though it also makes me realize how easily I lose the wood for the trees... we need friends to remind us of our broader commitments and questions! A few highlights from the conversation:

Was our course valuable as part of a liberal education? I've been thinking about Buddhism and liberal arts for a few years, as you know, but it wasn't a main concern of our project this semester. (In fact, I can't remember the last time I thought it about explicitly - d'oh!) But the answer came easy: yes. Why? Because, I extemporized, it was an occasion for developing a deeper, truer sense of agency - of the world and one's place in it, of its challenges and the things one might do in response to them. You don't need to buy into the Buddhist answers, but engaging its questions is valuable. Also: ours was an adventure in liberal education because it schooled us in respect for others' efforts to make sense of these things: the Buddhism we encountered was emphatically plural and appropriately so.

What does it feel like to encounter a new idea? My first thought (which I went with) was that it should feel at once bizarre and familiar. We encounter a lot of weird ideas all the time and don't pursue them. It should be "out there" enough, different enough from your usual way of making sense of things, as to strike you as odd; but at the same time it should resonate in some way, something you thought you knew will shine with a new clarity in its light. So you abide with it a while. I mentioned William James' idea of how knowledge grows, but might also have mentioned his idea of a "live option." One of the benefits of small seminar classes is that you can experience more things as potentially live options for you as you witness them resonating with others. But - another thing I'd forgotten (and forgot while talking to her) - this was one of the recurring questions of the first part of our course! Remember? It appeared as the question of (how) it is possible to really encounter anything new...

The hardest question to answer was actually the first one she asked me: How did I think the course went? I was surprised that I hesitated in responding, since I think - I know - we had an amazing seminar. But the very nature of its success made the question somehow tricky. As a truly collaborate venture, with a syllabus recalibrated as we went along, our course ended up in a truly different place than I thought we would. This was of course by design! But still, I was suddenly aware of a gap between the retrospective coherence of what we had done and any of the things I had imagined we might do when we started. What tripped me up was something I don't even think my friend meant as part of the question: how the actual course would measure up to its starting intention? In many cases that's just the right question to be asking but it seemed somehow too easy to say "it was an open-ended course." I'm still now sure why I was tripped up here... it may be because not just the syllabus but the instructor were changed by the experience!

We talked about other stuff than "Buddhism and Modern Thought," of course, as one does. But it was refreshing to be reconnected to these big questions about education which - I'd nearly forgotten this, too! - are among those which led me to decide to spend next year in China! What do we teach? Why do we learn? How do we live?

Hand-off

So today was the last official meeting of the Buddhism and Liberal Arts tutorial advising group. I invited them over for 手巻き寿司 temaki sushi... I suppose I went a little bit overboard, but I have no regrets! An excuse to make my own kimpira gobô, and my first rolled omelette. As you can see it's a jolly group and we've had a truly wonderful experience. I think we'll be seeing each other again, perhaps even as a group. (Actually two are signed up for courses with me next semester.) The plan's for a repeat of tonight in the Fall - with them cooking!

PS Is it just me, or does this remind you too of Brueghel's "Großer Blumenstrauß" (1606/7) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum?

Healing the world

My "Buddhism and Liberal Arts" advising tutorial continues to be a blast. In principle we've been working our way through a chapter of Hsiao-Lan Hu's This-worldly Nibbana: A Buddhist-Feminist Social Ethic for Peacemaking in the Global Community, but, as ever, our discussions have been wide-ranging. Hu challenges traditional Buddhists and many new agey western Buddhists to think socially rather than individually about practice and effect, which aligns nicely with the activist culture of our college. But she also argues against "oppositional" thinking, even when thinking about oppression, directing us instead (with inspiration from peace and conflict studies founder Johann Galtung) to look beyond actual violence to the structural violence that makes it possible, and beyond structural violence to the cultural violence that makes it seem natural. (Good politics even for non-Buddhists, methinks.) Oppositional thinking is ineffective politically, she argues, but also bad for those thinking and acting in those terms, as it takes them into the territory of the three poisons of greed, hatred and delusion. It's a rich, dense, exciting book - a bit advanced for people without much background in Buddhist studies, perhaps, but full of useful provocations and sources. A mere meditation-for-wellness view of Buddhism looks pretty wan in its light - which was my intention in assigning it.

Nevertheless, the pleasure of this gathering for me has been precisely the experience of a non-academic engagement with Buddhism, and wellness and meditation are the concerns of several of my students. When I invited that masterful Tibetanist to join us a few weeks ago I thought he was liberating them from this concern, but that just goes to show how unmasterful I am. Remember I thought that he had parried a question about Buddhism changing your brain by evoking the monstrous beating heart of a lama who had grown extra arteries to cope with heart disease - surely we didn't want Buddhism messing with the core of our fleshly being like that, I thought! I thought it was supposed to be grotesque, but not, it turns out, the student who asked, who today told us he has found hope in it for healing a number of serious medical conditions he's recently and suddenly encountered. Buddhism interests him precisely for its promise to work "on the cellular level," knitting his broken body back together.

I suppose, with Hu, I have a similar hope for the social body... How much we can learn from each other! We have another visitor next week, a Vietnamese meditation leader and researcher on mindfulness practices in organizations. Is it OK to be having so much fun?

Skilful!

We had a master in our classroom today. For the fourth meeting of our advising tutorial on "Buddhism and liberal arts" I invited P, an acquaintance who's devoted almost thirty years to the translation and analysis of Sanskrit and Tibetan epistemological and grammatical texts and happens also to be one of the most free and original people I know. What I didn't know - not that I'm surprised - is that he's also amazingly skilful.

Here are two examples, expertly targeted at common misconceptions about Buddhist meditation - that it's primarily about clearing the mind, and that it makes you more compassionate as well as happier.

One of the readings I'd distributed was a slick little essay by Robert Wright called "Should Buddhist meditation make you happy?" which tells of his attending a meditation retreat in Barre, MA (where I had mine a few years ago). He finds that, while mindfulness lets him detach from positive as well as negative feelings, when he heads home he's enjoying the beauty of nature more and feeling more empathy with people: he's happier and nicer! P said Wright's story reminded him of a friend of his who had recently found an adorable little house in North Berkeley. She attended a retreat like the one Wright did and blissed out as he did. But when she came home she found that there was garbage on the street corner, and that the paint was peeling on her really very small place. Buddhism doesn't teach you to filter out all but the positive, it opens you to what is, whatever it is. It might not be beautiful.

Later, a student asked what P thought of studies that allegedly show that meditation changes your brain to make you more compassionate. P had a two-part response. First, he told of a Tibetan lama who lived a long time with a heart disease. When he died, an autopsy was conducted, and it was discovered that he had developed two fat extra arteries around his heart, that had compensated for his weakened heart. P's cupped hands modeling the amplified heart quivered. The class was excited by this but also disturbed. This was not an all but imperceptible tweak to your parietal lobe we were talking about. Do we want Buddhism messing with our heart as well as our mind?

Then P told of a study of the effects of meditation conducted in the US. Research subjects from all walks of life were shown pictures meant to determine how compassionate their responses were, and most people scored 30-50 on some scale. The experimenters had wanted some Buddhist meditators, though, and asked the Dalai Lama to help them. He furnished them with an old monk. The old monk maxed out the experiment, scoring something like 200. When he was asked how many years he had been meditating he said he had no time to meditate. He was the abbot of a monastery and spent most of his time doing accounting. All he could manage was a brief prayer for the well-being of the monks each morning. Meditate on that!

Public / private

An interesting topic which came up during my tutorial advising group's discussion at Radiance: higher education as a public or private good. (Okay, so that's the language I proposed for it, but the topic arose organically from the conversation.) Like many students at our school, they find a contradiction between our "progressive" aims and our price-tag. If a kind of education is accessible only to wealthier students, how progressive can it be? One of our number, a Canadian, sees progressive liberal arts becoming something like its opposite under these circumstances, entrenching privilege by giving upper class students the illusion that they have encountered the excluded rest.

Too true. As our dean says, the "business model of higher education is broken." I'm excited to be at a place where efforts are being made to do something, but there's not much we can about the structural constraints of a labor-intensive small-class curriculum in an expensive city reliant for funding on its students - "tuition-driven," we tend to say, but "debt-driven" is the more difficult truth.

What made yesterday's discussion different from similar discussions I've had (believe me, the topic is on everyone's mind) was the international perspective my group brought. One is, as I've said, Canadian, and was in Montreal during some of last year's student protests against tuition raises. Another transferred from a big-lecture state school in New England, but by way of study abroad in Turkey, where several friends recommended he finish his studies in a state-subsidized European university. To the others the idea that public education might be free, or substantially subsidized by, was eye-opening. I told them of my British classmates at Oxford who (how things have changed!) not only paid no tuition but received a stipend for living, almost like a wage for being a student.

The day when higher education will again, or at last, be a universal right the way K-12 schooling is, isn't coming any time soon. But it's worth appreciating one of the ways in which our current system fails us. Since students and their families have to pay, or borrow, so much for an education, they naturally think of what they get as something that's theirs, something they scrimped and saved for, worked hard for, spent years paying for. It's a private good. Caught in this system we can hardly imagine that society might invest in you, making your education a public good.

Question of the day: is liberal arts, as currently configured and imagined, constrained by - even as it challenges - the idea of higher education as a private good?

LacMoMA

So this was the day Mark told his Buddhism & Liberal Arts advising tutorial group to meet at the Museum of Modern Art, to soak in the opaque warmth of Wolfgang Laib's "Pollen from Hazelnut" in the atrium, reflect on a reading from David Loy's A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack over coffee, and to strongly recommend a look at "Inventing Abstraction: 1910-25." Good ideas all, especially the lack-abstraction connection, but... MoMA's closed on Tuesdays!

We were fine. The lobby was open. You could watch traffic on 54th (as above, flashing). Even better was watching the people breezing in from 53rd - as each of us had done - looking surprised and delighted that it was so empty and then haltingly, each in her own way, slowing down in confusion or consternation at the unwelcome realization that the museum was closed. Lack of museum! (Surely someone's made a video of just this, and sold it to a museum of modern art somewhere?)

The students took it in their stride. Maybe it's even a relief when the big cultural institution stands there mute (or when your teacher blows it!). And as a consolation prize, each of us filled in one of the I went to MoMA and... cards which you can fill in, scan, and, eventually, see projected overhead with others saying things like great art! and fell in love and I can't believe my eyes! It was as I imagined - all here in real life. memorable. Here's the 15 seconds of fame mine received:

Instead of spending time with Laib and then repairing to the museum café for our convo, we made our way to Eastern Radiance, a Chinese tea house on 55th Street, where we tittered over the purple descriptions of our An Xie Tie Guan Yin and Yellow Mt. Mao Feng tea. And - whaddaya know - talked, and talked! Our topic was "School/Life" and being off-campus freed up conversation nicely. Two students eventually had to return to school for another class; the others stayed another hour.

A pleasure

Here's rather a sweet poem I found, for use in my advising tutorial. (I think what I'll do is ask students to tell of an experiences corresponding to each of the three wondrous lines of the second stanza.)

I am a student

I am a student.
I have been a student as long as I remember.
And it is a pleasure to be a student.

It is a pleasure to learn that I don't know.
It is a pleasure to learn that I already know.
It is a pleasure to learn that I was mistaken.

It is a joy to learn from Great Masters.
It is a joy to learn by sharing what I learnt.
It is a joy to learn how to be what I am.

I seek to learn about the world around me.
I seek to learn about what I actually am.
I seek to learn how to be a proper human being.

Clouds show me the nature of my world.
Rivers show me the nature of myself.
Babies show me how to be more human.

I am a student.
I will be a student as long as I live.
And it is a pleasure to be a student.

Ringu Tulku Rinpoche

Gangtok, 18th January 2003

[Different parts of this stand out for different people. I'm all about the second stanza. For my friend G it was "Rivers show me the nature of myself," for my Advising Tutorial students it was "Babies show me how to be more human," for my friend L it was "I seek to learn how to be a proper human being."]

Liberating arts?

The second session of "Buddhism and Liberal Arts" was as exciting as the first! Turns out we have lots of thoughts about Buddhism - especially about meditation. (Very interesting discussion about the value of journaling about meditation, something a New School instructor requires of his students.) The prompt "liberal arts," however, drew a somewhat embarrassed blank, and some rather cynical views when I prodded. (You wouldn't guess that from our whiteboard, though: we brainstorm around "Buddhism" next week.) It's curious. These are just the sort of students who should be at a liberal arts college and they're doing everything right (like finding out about "B&LA"!), but they've been given no articulate sense of what we're doing and why it's worth doing. It's easier to say what liberal arts is not, one said. What's missing seems (at least at first) to be a sense that liberal arts might involve a truth that sets you free - that there might be objective truths and not just endless varied interpretations in matters human. Let's see if they have similar expectations from Buddhism. Next week we meet at MoMA.

Charmed I'm sure

The first meeting of my Advising Tutorial, "Buddhism & Liberal Arts," was like a dream. Somehow, seven students I don't know had found out about it, and five of them are free Tuesday afternoons - something that never happens. And what a fascinating bunch! From first year to senior, a linguist, a dancer, a global studies major, a libertarian socialist anarchist (whatever that may be), with various generally non-academic exposures to Buddhist traditions and eager to find out more. Our time together was framed by tangerines - everyone got one with the syllabus, and at the end of our discussion we passed around Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh's description of mindful tangerine-eating, each reading a section, and had a second. Here's some of it:

When you children peel a tangerine, you can eat it with awareness or without awareness. What does it mean to eat a tangerine in awareness? When you are eating the tangerine, you are aware that you are eating the tangerine. You fully experience its lovely fragrance and sweet taste. When you peel the tangerine, you know that you are peeling the tangerine; ... If the tangerine is real, the person eating it is real. That is what it means to eat a tangerine in awareness.

Children, what does it mean to eat a tangerine without awareness? When you are eating the tangerine, you do not know that you are eating the tangerine. You do not experience the lovely fragrance and sweet taste of the tangerine. When you peel the tangerine, you do not know that you are peeling the tangerine; ... Eating a tangerine in such a way, you cannot appreciate its precious and wonderful nature. If you are not aware that you are eating the tangerine, the tangerine is not real. If the tangerine is not real, the person eating it is not real either. Children, that is eating a tangerine without awareness. ...

A person who practices mindfulness can see things in the tangerine that others are unable to see. An aware person can see the tangerine tree, the tangerine blossom in the spring, the sunlight and rain which nourished the tangerine. Looking deeply, one can see ten thousand things which have made the tangerine possible. Looking at a tangerine, a person who practices awareness can see all the wonders of the universe and how all things interact with one another. 

Children, our daily life is just like a tangerine. Just as a tangerine is comprised of sections, each day is comprised of twenty four hours. One hour is like one section of tangerine. Living all twenty-four hours of a day is like eating all the sections of a tangerine. The path I have found is the path of living each hour of the day in awareness, mind and body always dwelling in the present moment. The opposite is to live in forgetfulness. If we live in forgetfulness, we do not know that we are alive. We do not fully experience life because our mind and body are not dwelling in the here and now.

All more easily said than done, as we confessed to each other! I'll bring more tangerines next week. Eating together (and, in our last session, cooking together) is a big part of my plan for the group's  journey.

Incidentally, I didn't have to buy these tangerines. I dropped off some leftover Spanish chickpea stew with a friend who's hurt her hand and can't cook, and she surprised me with this bag!

"Tutorial advising"

Our college is piloting a new kind of academic program this semester, tentatively called "Tutorial Advising." Students will meet regularly in groups of 5-7 with a faculty member, as in a course (they get 1 academic credit for it), but the purpose is discussing the sorts of issues and concerns specific to academic advising. Reflecting on their careers as students, their vocational and career plans, etc., with visitors, excursions, shared meals. I think it's a great idea.

There are four pilots, and I'm doing one. Two are targeted at specific majors - one in screen studies, one in psychology. The other two, including mine, are as wide as the phrase "liberal arts." Mine will give me a chance to continue some of the great discussions which came out of our "Buddhism and the Future of the Liberal Arts" roundtable. In fact, it's called "Buddhism & Liberal Arts." Here's the tentative description:

This advising tutorial uses the phrase Buddhism & Liberal Arts as a kind of kôan, framing a shared journey exploring old and new meanings of learning, vocation, and the meaning of life. We’ll tap into ongoing debates about the nature and relevance of “liberal arts,” in theory and in our own lives at Lang, braiding them with Buddhist questions and practices, and with shared experiences on and (mostly) off-campus. 

Students will help assemble readings and other shared experiences which turn on the dualities of school/life, study/practice, contemplation/activism, personal/political, spontaneity/discipline, self/nonself, and path/destination. We “turn on” these dualities in four ways inspired by the history of Buddhist reflection: 
1) we let a given duality serve as the center of our discussion 
2) we complicate it in every way we can, teasing out its presuppositions and implications and challenging them 
3) we explore ways of breaking free from its constraints, and finally 
4) we consider ways of reclaiming the duality that can make it real and helpful for us as we think about shaping our lives. 

Learning Outcomes: 
• Becoming more intentional about your liberal arts education, and more thoughtful about how to translate it into your life and the wider world 
• Developing a practice of reflecting thoughtfully about your academic journey and life choices 
• Helping to craft questions and conversations for pursuing these concerns with others

We'll meet ten times for 90 minutes, only four of them at school. We'll meet twice at the Rubin Museum of Art, once at MoMA, once in a park, once at a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant, once at my house (to prepare a meal together). I'm quite excited, but it will all depend on finding the right students! That's the task of the next few weeks...