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Saturday 12th March
Series: Sat. 13th Feb – Sat. 26th March
Week 5 of the :
COURSE IN THAI BUDDHISM
Overview:
This week we continue our exploration of Buddhism, focusing on key stories. After the ‘setting forth of the wheel of dharma’ Buddhism spread from the roots of the trees, to becoming the root of several world cultures. Necessarily it changed. It is no longer a teaching given to some ascetics in the forests of India. How much then, should the teaching adapt?
Buddhism took root Southwards, becoming the Theravada Buddhism we know today, and northward to Kashmir and Tibet. One famous monk, Bodhidharma, is said to have taken the teaching to China, where it transformed radically. And from there to Japan.
To what extent can we still call it Buddhism?
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Full Course Details:
You can see the full details for this course by clicking here.
If you are just joining the course there is a one-time fee of 100 baht, which covers all remaining weeks. Each week deals with a different topic in the Buddhist story (topics all listed on the main announcement).
The course is academic in approach, rather than religious. We want to understand the thinking and philosophy behind both Buddhism and Thai culture, which are of course, intimately linked.
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Schedule:
We’ll stick to the schedule precisely.
Saturday morning, 12th March
- 9:45am Meet at the Rojana Center
- 10-11am talk on The Roots of Trees and Cultures
- 11-11:30 Questions
- 11:30 finish (promptly)
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Gatherings are at the beautiful, and spacious Rojana Center, Sukhumvit 23
full map, GPS and directions are on the main announcement here.
Dear Ajaan Pandit,
This course looks so interesting. I have enjoyed your overviews in other talks and know it will be a great course. Unfortunately I work on Saturdays, so cannot participate.
I am now using a book by David Loy with the flashy title of “Money, Sex, War and Karma: notes for a Buddhist revolution”, where he gets quite explicit on arguments for changing certain emphases in general Buddhism and in Theravada in particular.
So the Western (read “American”) Buddhist revisionists are out of the closet, disregarding charges of simply substituting Asian cultural baggage for their own, and the process of spread and acculturation continues. But this time the arguments for a fundamental revision of basic teachings (or at least those attributed to the Buddha’s cultural environment) are very strong.