Zen and the Environment: It’s Not What You Think
December 2nd, 2010
6:30 PM
“Zen and the Environment: It’s Not What You Think”
Lecture by Wendi L. Adamek
Venue: Faculty House, Columbia University
*Sponsored by the Columbia University Buddhist Studies Seminar with additional support from the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture and the Columbia Center for Japanese Religion
Zen is a hospitable environment for images of emptiness and all-inclusiveness, presenting the realized person as someone who is “at home everywhere. ”A verse from the famous “Ten Oxherding Pictures” says: “Inside his hut, he does not see any object, nothing, outside: rivers flow onward by themselves, and blossoms turn crimson like that.”
Well, does the river flow onward by itself if someone has taken away all the water? In this talk we’ll look at relationships with the non-human world as presented in the “Ten Oxherding Pictures” and the “Fox Koan.” Then we’ll ask: how does the Zen practice of self-forgetting/self-presenting work in the wilderness of our current cultural-natural challenges?
Lecturer Information:
Wendi L. Adamek is a scholar of Chinese religions and environmental issues. Her award-winning first book, The Mystique of Transmission, centered on an 8th century Chan/Zen group in Sichuan. She is currently working on watershed restoration on Maui, while finishing a book on a community of 7th century Buddhists and their relationships with their environment.
