Sacred space

After twenty inspired and inspiring years, the Rubin Museum of Art is closing October 6th. I went for a farewell visit today, appreciating their final exhibition's characteristically lovely way of activating their collection. Contemporary Himalayan artists were invited to respond to particular objects from the collection, which were then exhibited near the new work (or in a few cases, the new with the old). 

(Works by Pema "Tintin" Tshering, Charwei Tsai, Jasmine Rajbhandari)

Their curation has always been remarkable, allowing intimate and deeply meaningful encounters with art that is, after all, religiously charged, and this was no exception. They're making the best of closing, inviting us to share their excitement about becoming a "global museum" - a virtual museum? traveling exhibits? But these re-encounters with the collection - like this exquisite 13th/14th century Nepalese Avalokitesvara - made the loss of this museum even sadder.

I learned much of what I think I know about museum curation from a relationship with the Rubin which has included countless class visits and collaborations - click the tag "Rubin Museum of Art" at the bottom of this post for many such edifying episodes, including the one, in 2011, from which Atta Kim's melting ice Buddha at the top of this post hails. 

Looking back on it I'm reminded of the wisdom, including wisdom about traditions of accepting and even welcoming change, that the museum has always offered. Asha Kama Wangdi has filled the six-storey stairwell of the museum with a column of discarded prayer flags, known as "wind horses," and crafted actual horses emerging from them. Maybe their work is done in this space.

There has always something terrifically embodied about the experiences they offered, engaging all the senses, the space, and the feelings we bring and take from it, and this final show is no exception. 

In the Tibetan Shrine Room, their most immersive space, there's a piece of broken concrete with the words PLEASE TOUCH. It's a work by John Tsung called "神代/Divine Generation" and it quivers. It's a fragment from the foundation of the building, and has been wired up with 1000 feet of cables, inscribed with the Heart Sutra, which encircle the museum's walls and stairwells like a nervous system, or prayer beads. Touching it you feel the vibrations of people moving through the whole building. How lovely, how deep! I can feel that tingle in my hand even now.

One more work, which also allows us to accept the passing of the museum, at least in this form, itself a response to the Shrine Room. Kunsang Gyatso's "Goddess of Tangerine," we learn, suggests an alternate universe in which tangerines are worshiped because of their extinction ... us[ing] the dried tangerines to metaphorically visualize time and impermanence ... I'm not sure if Gyatso has Thich Nhat Hanh's tangerine meditation in mind. In any case, it's witty, allows us to acknowledge the unthinkability of loss (could tangerines disappear?!) while conjuring hope through its beauty. 

Thank you, Rubin Museum, for two decades of wonder.

Not for show

Accidents of scheduling took me to two exhibitions today which seek to challenge the ethos of exhibition. "What is the use of Buddhist art?" at the Wallach Art Gallery tries valiantly to let its magnificent works from Columbia's collection of Buddhist art be encountered not as aesthetic or historic objects but as figures of devotion. The other, "Lenapoehoking" at the Brooklyn Public Library's Greenpoint branch, tries to conjure the genocide of our region's indigenous population and seed a kind of return. 

For all its meritorious efforts, the former wasn't really successful. Captions explained why objects were made but the exhibit still isolated them from the rhythms of Buddhist practice, which we'd learned just enough about to know was incredibly specific, local to a particular time, donor and setting. (The Wallach Gallery, which had two other shows on in the same large space, has a unifying aesthetic so the curators' hands were tied.) The displays invited a kind of intimate looking but this will have been fundamentally different from the stance of those "using" these figures and texts. I didn't feel any of them as objects of salvific power except in the (perhaps intentional) reflections of two cases containing medieval Japanese figures above. Not that I can imagine a non-cheesy way of letting exhibition guests get a taste of the prostration, chanting, incensing, gifting with fruit and flowers or other interactions through which practitioners will have engaged these works (the Rubin Museum has thought all this through more comprehensively) but the airy silence, white walls and glass cases of the gallery encouraged only the usual quasi-religious devotion which art museums encourage.

Quite different was "Lenapehoking," which quite deliberately chose a library rather than a museum or gallery setting for the first Lenape-curated experience in the city. Above a bustling local library full of children and people using the free wi-fi, a darkened room presented five glass-beaded bandoliers, a turkey feather gown, and, against the darkened windows, three "tapestries" of dried vines of three native bean species recently "rematriated" to the area. Some local fruit trees will be planted in the roof garden of the library starting next week, too. Two of the bandoliers, including the one at left in the photo (from here), are from the early 19th century, after the Lenape had already been driven from their homeland, but pose in a suspended dance with new ones commissioned for this show. And yet the mannequins make clear that bandoliers are for wearing, and as one circles around them one starts to feel the absence/presence of the shoulders and hips they embraced, and is increasingly astonished at their durability and survival. The bean tapestries, meanwhile, full of pods full of seeds, conjure the upward and downward motion of vines and beans, death and future life. After a while what had seemed a small and straightforward exhibition proves instead to be a space of looping time of absence and promise, the scene of a crime and an opening to hope.

Both exhibitions were good to think with.

Smooth landing

After a long hiatus, we residents of the 19th floor have resumed our gatherings for socially distanced drinks. A lifeline during the time of "shelter in place," they fell by the wayside as we were able once again to connect with friends and colleagues across the city. At last week's gathering we found out about the apple tree in the gardens, learned of another family who'd lived in the apartment that is now ours over the past decades (a third one, and like the other two, now in a larger apartment in the same complex), but most importantly we completedthe décor of the landing. (Each floor has its own look.) The old furniture donated by the Englishwoman in unit C and the print (a wedding gift from Pete Seeger) contributed by our neighbor in F needed something to connect them. The dried flowers that perched there all of last year were depressing and dusty. Living plants have been volunteered but withered without natural light. Then I remem-bered I had a bright little bouquet of felt flowers bought years ago in the gift shop of the Rubin Museum and brought them out in triumph.

Mandala-dimensional

Had the pleasure today of seeing a fab exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art with a friend who hasn't been to a museum - or to New York City - in a year! Since the exhibition, "Awaken: A Tibetan Buddhist Journey Toward Enlightenment," is about expanding one's perception, it was especially trippy. The exhibition begins with this fantastic (and wall-filling) work by Tsherin Sherpa, "Luxation 1" (2016), painted in response to the 2015 Nepal earthquake but here an invitation to recognize how jumbled our consciousness is. The exhibition, originally from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, was designed before the pandemic but for its Rubin iteration someone's put together, facing Sherpa's work, a wall of pad- and phone-sized screens busily flashing a sequence of images from the past year, in case we needed reminding!

The deity here, Vajrabhairava, a wrathful manifestation of Mañjushri, is the star of this show, which we discover is patterned after the meditation journey to which a 300 century old Mandala of Vajrabhairava (above) invites you. Of course what a mandala invites you to do is to visualize in three dimensions what it presents in two (and eventually to visualize yourself as the deities you've three-dimensionally visualized: nonduality realized). The exhibition manages to make this real in quite astounding ways you need to experience yourself. (It's open through early next year.) Ritual implements made from human skulls reinforce the reality of what Vajrabhairava is doing with two of his 34 hands: grinding up someone's brains in a bowl made of the top of (someone else's?) skull. Behold: a 15th century Tibetan "flaying knife-chopper" and 19th century Mongolian "skull cup":

(You can see the hands at work in the 3rd row, 2nd column of the Sherpa painting at the top.) It would flatten the exhibition's achievement back to two dimensions for me to show you pictures of its discoveries, not to mention undo the necessary work of journeying. But I have to say that it really was a double-taking and brain-scrambling experience - and not just for my friend who's been in two-dimensional zoom world for a year... It's like discovering the three-dimensional world - and your own three-dimensional body moving through it - for the first time. So no photos for our screen world of "Awaken"'s culminating 3D show-stoppers. But I guess I can share another painting of Sherpa's from the mid-point of the journey, the two-panel 2013 "Multiple Protector (Peach)." This controlled generative whirl is what is happening to your senses as you move through the plays of light and darkness, the straight and curved walls - maybe the edges of Vajrabhairava's flaying knife-chopper in our own brains! - of this expertly mandalically-designed exhibition!

Whirled religions

The theme for "After Religion" this coming week is "the invention of 'world religions'" and one of the assigned course materials is a museum in Taiwan.  世界宗教博物館 claims to be the world's only Museum of World Religions and I'm hoping students brave the virtual tour. If they do they'll see this, looking back along the exhibition's central axis.It's a model of the cathedral at Chartres, and you can see reflected in the glass behind it some of the other Greatest Sacred Buildings represented, from the Dome of the Rock to a 9th c. Buddhist temple in Shanxi, Ise Jingu to the Golden Temple in Amritsar; if you turned around, you'd see a scale model of Borobodur, near the center of the room, and on the wall behind it a display of Taiwanese folk religion. The religious architecture display, united by what appears to be a stream of water flowing in a loop underneath the models, is elevated a little above the main exhibit which encircles it, with displays dedicated to a selection of world religions: on the side through which you enter the space Daoism, Shinto, Maya, Sikhism and Hinduism, on the other Christianity, Judaism, Ancient Egypt, Islam and Buddhism. A relatively standard set except for Maya and Ancient Egypt which, while not represented among the monuments, mark the midpoints of the displays. (Here you see the Day of the Dead, presented as part of Maya, reflected in the vitrine of Ancient Egypt.) I'm hoping the layout here gets students thinking about how to think about religious plurality and how to represent it: I've learned from teaching with the Rubin Museum over the years that thinking about curating is a stimulating way to encourage analysis and synthesis. The most

observant might look at the whole museum, which has fun rituals built into the visit involving water and pilgrimage and handprints, and will notice that there is a particular theology of world religions organizing everything. Look again at the picture of Chartres above. The glass behind it reflects the world religions but you can also make out a round shape behind it. It's the heart of the building, a 3-story-high   suspended golden sphere called Avatamsaka World. (If it calls to mind the Hayden Planetarium at AMNH that's no coincidence; the same architectural firm designed both.) Visitors to the museum pass under this sphere as they enter, and walk past it on their way to the World Religions exhibit. The glorious Avatamsaka (Flower Garland, 華嚴 huayan/kegon) Sutra is centrally important to East Asian Buddhism, and definitely not what the western concocters of "world religions" had in mind! Do you suppose any of the students will look it up?

Impermanence

Took the "Religion and Ecology" class to the Rubin Museum today for their newest show, which is smashing - except for the title, "Measure your existence," which fails to communicate the organizing theme of impermanence (or much of anything else!). Its thoughtful, in many cases participatory works expand your sense of what it is to move through time, with and without those who are absent - including the departed. Go if you have a chance!

Shake on it

In "Theorizing Religion" today I projected this picture of my hand grasping the proffered bronze replica of the hand of Genesis P-Orridge in her "Touching of Hands" (2016). That work is part of the current iteration of Shrine Room Projects (all brilliant) at the Rubin Museum of Art. I'd asked students to go to the museum in lieu of class Monday (thinking I might be late because of a doctor's appointment, though that turned out not to be an issue). The photo was a test of their attendance - I didn't see that many when I went - and I was gratified that most students recognized it; some even grasped it. I'd unwittingly taken my picture from an angle which allowed people to imagine its caption making diametrically opposed claims:  

Wisdom can [...] passed on by the touching of hands

Can only be? Can not be? The actual text is the former, but of course the hand in question isn't actually a human hand; the only human hands you come into contact with are the others which have touched the bronze and will eventually, P-Orridge hopes, polish parts of it shiny. Tricky! It turned out to be a great way to consider the religious work that statues can perform, as well as the somewhat forlorn experience of religious statuary in an art museum - even the quasi-devotional Rubin.

Interactive

After a few months away, paid a visit to that savviest of museums, the Rubin, today. Interlaced with multimedia it's as thrilling as this ingenious portable mani shrine (tashi gomang) of Padmasam- bhava's Palace on the Copper-Colored Mountain (18th/19th century) must have been back in the day...

Sound world

The Rubin Museum's "The World is Sound" exhibit makes the whole place into a wondrous sensorium. The central glass and steel staircase, whose six levels recalled the realms of rebirth to Donald Rubin, now resonates with sounds arising and sbsiding, coiling, pooling, ascending:

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Le Corps Sonore (Sound Body), an immersive, site-specific installation composed for the Rubin Museum’s iconic spiral staircase by the pioneering electronic sound artists Éliane Radigue, Laetitia Sonami, and Bob Bielecki. Ambient drone sounds inspired by Buddhist philosophy are “tuned” to the building, and will ascend and descend as visitors wind their way up the staircase. The subtlety and ephemerality of the sounds prepare the listener for understanding a core tenet of Buddhist philosophy, where music is a metaphor for change and impermanence.

The top floor, presided over by an exquisite statue of Milarepa listening, offers an immersive experience of the collective Om synthesizing the chanting of ten thousand visitors (yours truly included) earlier this year. Most captivating are Tibetan Buddhist objects whose lives involve sound which are brought to life - or at least to sound - by visitors' touching the wall next to them (for various sutras and mantras) or standing near them (for musical instruments used in ritual). And then there is this astonishing 19th century musical notation for a Kagyu propitiation ritual.

Resisting the temptation of distance

The sacred mountains class became an extended infomercial for museums today. From the Met to the Rubin, Roerich Museum to Brooklyn Museum, I kept find myself telling students to go look at artworks on display around us. I even commended an exhibition I didn't find particularly inspiring when I saw it, the Met's new show "The Mysterious Landscapes of Hercules Segers," where I saw the print above. I put the image up as students discussed their first papers, in which I'd asked them to reflect on a claim taken (out of context) from Lama Anagarika Govinda, "To see the greatness of a mountain, one must be at a distance from it" - provocative in a course condemned to distance!

The papers were creative and resourceful, really impressive. While several protested that the toil of the trek or the vastness of a summig view are irreplaceable, many students found ways to agree with the assertion, considering temporal and emotional as well as physical distance. Isn't the greatness apprehended after the encounter? Does it perhaps prove itself only in the effect it has on someone's life? Some went so far as to say that it's better not to be in the presence of a mountain, let alone slogging up its tiring paths, seeing only what's right in front of you; to appreciate it as a mountain it's better to be coolly absorbing the reports and images of others' mountain experiences. Segers' landscapes are fascinating in part because he never left his flat Dutch home, faithfully reproduced at the center of his craggy capriccio.

Our reading for today was chapters 4 and 5 of Veronica della Dora's entirely wonderful Mountain: Nature and Culture, "Mountains and Vision" and "Mountains and Time." The latter helps historicize our sense of mountains as ancient ruins, formed over geological deep time, rather than as, say, the rubble produced by the Flood, temporary until "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low" (Isa. 40:4). The former occupied most of our discussion, though, as it offers instruction in "premodern topographic ways of seeing."

We had an amazing discussion of her two representations of the temptation of Christ (above), painted 500 years apart. In the former, by Duccio, organized like an icon, sizes and relations aren't "realistic" but true; Christ is bigger than the mountain to which Satan takes him, and bigger than the cities seen from it. Everything is seen from his vantage point, including the viewer. In the latter, by a William Raphael Smith, all the figures - including Christ's - are dwarfed by a broad landscape; more, the vantage is that of the viewer surveying all, including Christ.

Talk about temptation!

And then it was time for Chinese landscape. della Dora includes a reproduction of Guo Xi's "Early Spring," but the book is small and the picture even smaller, so I brought my poster of Wang Meng's "East Morning Thatched Cottage View" and we spread it out on the table between us. (Images of both, above.) It wasn't ideal, but it worked. Students quickly found themselves drawn into details, discovering tiny figures in various places, paths, streams and peaks appearing and disappearing. Without any relevant experience nobody'd remarked what della Dora said. Now, when I read it aloud, everyone got it: Chinese landscape painting offers a different way of seeing. While Western perspectival painting (and later mechanized photography) requires a fixed viewer gazing down from an elevated vantage point, Chinese landscape painting emphasizes the necessity of moving through the landscape, of wandering through the mountains. (134) Not "wandering through the painted mountains."

As we wandered Wang Meng's mountains in our classroom the question of distance collapsed under its own airless weight. Bernbaum's triangulations seemed empty, while Dogen came back with the force of the obvious: There are mountains hidden in marshes, mountains hidden in the sky; there are mountains hidden in mountains. There is a study of mountains hidden in hiddenness.

To end I read the whole passage by Govinda from which I'd poached the essay prompt. (It's easy to find online, and I'm a little disappointed only one student did, though several found the same clipping on websites of "great quotes.")

To see the greatness of a mountain, one must be at a distance from it; to understand its form, one must move around it; to experience its moods, one must see it at sunrise and sunset, at noon and at midnight, in sun and in rain, in snow and in storm, in summer and winter, and in spring and autumn. He who can see the mountain in this manner comes near to the life of the mountain, which is as intense as that of a human being. Mountains grow and decay, they breathe and pulsate with life, They attract and collect invisible energies from their surroundings: the energies of the air, of the water, of electricity and magnetism; they create winds, clouds, thunder-storms, rains, waterfalls, and rivers. They fill their surroundings with life and give shelter and food to innumerable living things. Such is the greatness of a mountain.

Lama Anagarika Govinda, “Foreword: Sacred Mountains,” in W. Y. Evans-Wentz,

Cuchama and Sacred Mountains (Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1981), xxx

We're in a good place to continue our wandering. We've named the problems - and the temptations - of distance. We've also tasted the ways in which, even in the absence of mountains, we can yet acknowledge and even sense their life.

Mountain sounds?

My sacred mountains class went to the Rubin Museum of Art today to experience "Khandroma: Himalayan Wind," a sound installation on their "Sacred Spaces" floor. (This picture is of the soundproofing, sideways.) "Himalayan Wind" stitches together samples from 120 hours of wind gusts recorded in 200 high-elevation monasteries and villages in Mustang last year, and is intended to give visitors (who sit on beanbags surrounded by speakers) an experience of transport. It was my third visit, and I still don't know what to make of it. The first time I found it noisy; the second time meditative. This time, surrounded by the supine forms of my students, I wondered just what this collage of different gusts was supposed to convey - not one particular place but something more general, and, in the absence of any human sounds (except some drone added later), something non- or inhuman. Why is that worth doing - feeling like you can hear what no human ear has heard? Next week we'll see what the class made of it, as we get a different kind of sonic experience of mountains: the sound ethnographer who was part of our Kailash trip will bring some of the sounds he recorded, which include the sound of feet, of belled pack animals, of rushing streams, etc.

Crowdsourced sacred

At the Rubin Museum of Art (which I've not had a chance to visit in a while), Genesis Breyer P-Orridge invited visitors to leave something for use in h/er growing, changing exhibit "Try to Altar Everything." Here are 

some of the objects. A complement, in a way, to the exhibition on Sacred Spaces, where visitors were encouraged to write down their sacred spaces and an animator turned them into a cute little movie.

Iterations

Currently on at the Rubin Museum of Art: an exhibition devoted to prayer beads. Most are, unsurprisingly, Buddhist and indeed Tibetan, but the case below has Hindu, Christian and Muslim exemplars. The docent showing us around emphasized that prayer beads are very personal, and it was tempting to imagine thumbs and fingers making their way around each one we saw, the beads making their own rounds as mouths and sometimes the rest of bodies worked their way through deepening iterations. There is a rack of prayer beads for visitors to finger, but without even a photograph of a hand, or a video of prayer 

 

beads in use, or a soundtrack of prayer beads clicking, the overall effect was static and lifeless like a gallery of x-rays. In a few places, however,

 

I sensed the curators doing the best they could, I guess, to mime this movement. I'm assuming the delightful play of shadows in the case at top was planned, the shapes looping and combining and intersecting in beautiful ways. And then there was this thousand-bead one from Korea, which a monk apparently used to mark his three thousand daily prostrations. (When people sought an audience with him they had to follow him on his rounds, we were told; most never made it through the three thousand prostrations - finding they were well on their way to enlightenment before that!) It speaks of spooling and unspooling time.

Keys to the gallery

Never a dull moment - especially come April, when all the school year's chickens come home to roost. So today - with last weekend's conference, Queer Christianities 2, seminar fellow selection, Santideva, Boston, tulips, Mount Kailash and Zaytuna College still on my mind - I had the pleasure of presenting at the conference Museums and Higher Education in the 21st Century: Collaborative Methods and Models for Innovation at Baruch College, with U, a cool new Lang administrator.

 

We had fifteen minutes to talk about the relationship of Lang and the Rubin Museum of Art, a relationship I've long been a part of, and decided to talk about planning (U) for improvisation (me). Our gambit was that the two institutions' Deweyan commitments to experiential learning have allowed us to develop a remarkably fertile relationship of mutual trust and playfulness. This relationship made possible not only unique and valuable learning experiences for students in courses bridging the two institutions but unique and valuable courses, which neither institution could have generated on its own.

We called it "the keys to the gallery." We started with a scene from a course one of my religious studies faculty taught using the Rubin. He knew the galleries well enough that he let the class explore on their own before one of them chose an object for discussion, and then let discussion flow around it, until it flowed to another work, and then another. To an observer it might look random and directionless, but his preparation, and the wisdom of the museum's curators, made it possible for the course both to cover essential material and to take forms appropriate and unique to that group of students. That was scene one, made possible by the instructor's giving students the keys to the gallery.

Scene two tells a similar story but at the course-development stage. Instead of an instructor bringing a group of students into a gallery, a college brings its faculty (as it were) into the museum's standing collection and upcoming exhibitions and lets some of them choose what to work with. This really is the way the Lang-Rubin courses have been generated, more out of administrative laissez faire than Deweyan conviction, but it has allowed a very distinctive curriculum to emerge. At first, the courses were ones you could have predicted, looking at the college's departments and the museum's collections: "Tibetan Buddhism," "Himalayan Art," "Mandalas," etc. But with time - once folks got to know each other - the partnership gave birth to courses appropriate and unique to the relationship.

I was there in part because that happened on my watch. I told how a trip to the Rubin with one of my first year seminars ("Religion in Dialogue," though I was remembering "Secularism at the Crossroads") had set me thinking about how a course one of whose anchors was the Rubin might explore the variety of ways in which religious objects are placed and presented in museums. The museum educators I asked about the possibility thought one might explore religious objects throughout the city - in religious settings, museums, commercial settings, private houses, etc. And they liked the idea enough to take it on themselves, generating the innovative and successful course "Divine on Display" for Religious Studies. This in turn generated another course, "Sacred Symbols," which found a home in the Arts in Context program. These cool discipline- and institution-transcending classes emerged from the friendships which the partnership had made possible, but also from an administrative set-up - explicated by U (all the pretty powerpoint slides are her work) - which gave faculty the the keys to the gallery.

So that was pretty neat, and I was able to illustrate with other courses which emerged from the matrix of the Lang-Rubin relationship, like one which thought outside the boxes of both college and museum called "Buddhism in New York," and another which went still farther afield, becoming a summer study program in Tibet. But what stole the show was scene three, a story about our seminar fellows.

Baruch College also has a close relationship with the Rubin, and its first year program has been bringing new students to the museum during orientation for a while. The museum proposed the same to us - that's me again, now with my First Year Chair's hat on. Based on our experience generating those distinctive courses I thought we might do something more creative, and so the seminar fellows - the peer advisers who run the weekly First Year Workshops each Fall - had a 90-minute training as museum guides one week, halfway through the semester. The head of the outreach program initiated them not only into the museum's etiquette (never point at a work of religious art but gesture with an open palm) but into their pedagogy (plant people in front of something and wait for them react to it) as well as giving access to a database which provides background on each piece. The seminar fellows then brought their classes to the museum the week following on their own. They were free to do whatever they wanted: we gave them (yes) the keys to the gallery.

The results weren't unmixed. One of the swottier seminar fellows felt she had to pretend to be an authority on Himalayan art and was found out (or thought she was). Most, however, took it in their stride. "Look," they said to their first years, "I've only been here a few more times than you have, but they did tell me a thing or two about what's going on here and this - gesturing at a statue or tangka - is a pretty good example; isn't it gorgeous? It has an amazing history too..." It's kinda like what they were doing as seminar fellows in the first place - college students a few years ahead of the new arrivals but still making their way through the same college's wonders and puzzles. I gather some others said something along the lines of "I'm not sure why we're here - nearest museum to school, I guess - but it's got some awesome stuff; since we're here, we might as well make the most of it. I really like this piece..." Most took the trust we placed in them and rose to the occasion.

Best of all were two seminar fellows who were uncomfortable with the Rubin - what's all this Asian stuff doing in New York? - and integrated the museum into ongoing discussions about diversity, representation and cultural appropriation. When I reported that these seminar fellows had assigned their students an angry article about shallow and disrespectful appropriation of Asian religious symbols in American popular culture ("There comes a point where you are now a walking caricature of another culture by exotifying and romanticizing their culture and that’s offensive and dehumanizing") I could tell we had struck a nerve. Getting this right matters!

In closing we returned to a scene like the opening scene, except that there was no instructor in sight, just students and a somewhat more experienced student, none of them specialists or even devotés of the museum's collections. Here was something new and dangerous, something none of us would have come up with on our own, and I could tell at least some of the assembled museum educators were really intrigued by it. Everyone had been talking about the need to open up to new audiences and allowing students their own experiences, but I dare say nobody had allowed it to go so far...

A little anarchic we may be, but there is method to our madness!

Good karma

Our roundtable on Buddhism and the Liberal Arts went swimmingly. More than swimmingly, it was inspiring, a deliciously varied set of reflections, one more stimulating than the next, and all by people with meaningful connections to our program. Our brief:

The study of Buddhist traditions is one of the strengths of Lang's Religious Studies program. Our courses have introduced students to the interdisciplinary engagements of Buddhism with such fields as cognitive science, gender studies and ethics. This roundtable discussion builds on these curricular experiences to explore the role Buddhism and Buddhist studies might play more broadly in the liberal arts. How might Buddhist practices and insights enrich pedagogy? Can Buddhist perspectives help us reimagine disciplines and interdisciplinarities? And might Buddhist studies offer new responses to old questions about the value of a liberal arts education?

A little ambitious, but that was the point. At a time when liberal arts is being attacked on all sides for irrelevance, unaffordability and Eurocentrism, engagement with Buddhist studies can help not only on these three levels but in reminding us of their interconnection.

The first speaker was Chris Kelley, who's taught for us for several years. A gifted organizer of major international conferences in consciousness studies and Buddhist ethics, he's completing a dissertation on Buddhism and human rights. Here he introduced Martha Nussbaum's arguments for the value of liberal arts education and took them to the next level. Nussbaum argues that cosmopolitan citizens need to be capable of critical thinking, transcending local loyalties, and sympathetically imagining the predicament of others. For Nussbaum the second is all about the study of other cultures, but what about the first and the third? Chris introduced Buddhist resources and pedagogical traditions which might contribute to the other two as well, notably two Tibetan Buddhist practices: debates which combine memorization and spontaneity, reason and creativity (above) and the remarkable and powerful "exchanging self for other" meditation practice, both of which would, I dare say, blow the mind of many a smug cosmopolitan!

Next came Laura Lombard, who coordinates educational outreach for the Rubin Museum and has also taught classes for us. She described the museum's Deweyan philosophy of education, and told us of two classes which made unusual use of the Rubin's collections, a math class which studied mandalas as part of a study of symmetry, and a communication studies class which became entranced by the gestural language of Buddhist figures, studied their use in over 100 films of Gelugpa debates, and discovered a whole world of gestures, along with studies of their remarkable pedagogical power. Especially in the former case, however, she said she was a little concerned if the works - religious works

designed for a specific religious use - were being abused in some way, and asked a Lama, who reassured her that if they were helping people it was fine. This question continues to engage the curators and educators at RMA, she told us. They were helped in their thinking by a powerful work of art, an ice Buddha assembled by artist Atta Kim (above and here), which melted as people touched it (the water poured into jars viewers were encouraged to take home and pour into their plants). She started and ended her presentation with images of this work which, first describing how it touched viewers to the museum, and then describing how it helped the curators negotiate their work sharing largely religious work in a secular setting. For Atta Kim is not a Buddhist.

The next speaker, Ryan Bongseok Joo, teaches Buddhist studies at Hampshire College - but he tuaght his first course ("Introduction to Buddhist Meditation Traditions") for us. A monk as well as a scholar, he talked about how the liberal arts setting of Hampshire had freed him from the academic study of Buddhism's anxieties about mixing practice and study. When he was interviewing for jobs, he said, potential employers were excited that he was Asian and a Buddhist, and also worried by it: did he really appreciate the difference between teaching religion and teaching about religion? He did, of course. But his students don't! What to do? The breakthrough came from the interdisciplinary co-teaching which Hampshire encourages and celebrates. In a course taught with a professor of environmental studies, and in another in development with a professor of counseling and psychotherapy, religious studies' anxieties about practice/study lose their force.

After a break, our fashion studies collaborator from the Parsons School of Design Otto von Busch discussed some of his work trying to imagine forms of "fashion-ability" which are more ethical and sustainable, and his new project to explore the possibilities of "Buddhist fashion," a term inspired by the "Buddhist economics" of E. F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful. He amused us with a project he and some students undertook to take the rhetoric from the UNIQLO catalog and imagine making it real: instead of just "Fashion for all," how about thinking about "Fashion by all"? If fashion should be affordable, how about making it free! Then he entranced us with images of the "Taking Refuge in Restoration"

  

project he conducted with California College of the Arts and the Grren Gulch Zen Center in San Francisco. Inspired by the Zen rakusu tradition of sewing pieces of other (perhaps distinguished dead) monks' robes into one's robes, they invited people to bring clothes needing repair, but big enough that they might also yield material for patching others'. And so everyone came, cut and sewed, and left with clothes repaired, patched with cloth from someone else who had also come in need of repair and left restored. One mantra of Otto's program at Parsons is that since "everyone dresses," changing our experience of fashion might lead to profound personal and social transformations. Buddhist ones, even!

Finally Joseph Roccasalvo, a retired professor of Theravada Studies and novelist who frequents the Lang Cafe, gave an impassioned account of Siddhartha Gotama's discovery that the illusion of self was the cause of all suffering. It was a story everyone present knew, but it was bracingly presented in a way which challenged us to look beyond anodyne therapeutic appropriations of Buddhist meditation promising to make us more calm, happy, productive people. Gotama's enlightenment was a big deal, of cosmic significance, his call to abandon narcissism for attention still one of the most radical challenges one can make. Can liberal arts be liberation arts?

There wasn't much time for the promised roundtable discussion, but I'm not sure anyone much minded. Each of the presentations had been splendid, beautifully presented and full of food for thought. And has there ever been this kind of exchange, so wide-ranging, on these questions? One thing which did become clear, though, was that we were only able to do this together tonight because we've been doing it severally for years. When the panelists gathered around a table for the discussion one said he felt like they were "inside Mark Larrimore's head" but I trust this discussion made clear to all how much Mark Larrimore's head has been shaped and filled by the opportunities of his interdisciplinary home at Lang and the remarkable resources available all around. Buddhism and the liberal arts have an exciting future, happening already at The New School!

We hope that "Buddhism and the Future of the Liberal Arts" continues, perhaps as a monthly discussion series - though I suspect we won't just talk, but will debate and gesture and patch and even, betimes, meditate. Let me know if you'd like to be involved!