The Institute of Buddhist Studies provides graduate level education in the entirety of the Buddhist tradition with specialized instruction supporting Jodo Shinshu Buddhist ministry.
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World Cup 2010: Oh Peace, Korea
As political tension rises between South Korea and North Korea, Euronews.net reports that a Buddhist temple in Seoul organized a live viewing of the North Korea vs. Portugal world cup game in order to promote peace between the two Korean nations. One thousand South Koreans gathered at the event in Seoul on Monday to cheer on the North Korean team. More » -
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Green Buddhism, Basketball, Gary Gach, and Stephen Batchelor
Green Buddhism James Ure's Buddhist Blog looks at Green Buddhism. With the ongoing horrors of the BP Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, environmental concerns weigh heavily on us all. James calls the environment "the ultimate middle-path." Similarly Clark Strand's recent columns for tricycle.com describe the way of the Green Bodhisattva, a description of the environmentally awake Buddhist. Clark will continue to write for us on this urgently important matter. More » -
Sacred Hoops and Spirit in Sport
A recent post on the NBA finals got Editor-at-Large Andrew Cooper thinking and he wrote to me: The Lakers/Celtics rivalry is the greatest in U. S. team sports. When I was about eight years old, I saw a picture in Sports Illustrated of Elgin Baylor shooting the ball while suspended in mid-air at some impossible angle, and I thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. I’ve been a Lakers fan ever since. Baylor and Jerry West were my basketball heroes, and year after year they would lose in the finals to the hated Celtics. It was heartbreaking. Years later, I was at the Zen Center of Los Angeles when the Magic/Bird rivalry hit its stride. Sports don’t get more intensely competitive than that. More » -
World Cup 2010
Back in 2007, three years before professional soccer teams were set to descend on South Africa's cities, 2010 World Cup fever was already taking hold. In Cape Town, where I was living at the time, billboards, posters, and television ads encouraged South Africans to keep the cities clean and safe in preparation for their 2010 visitors and hotels and restaurants had begun remodeling in anticipation of the hordes of fans. It will be the first World Cup to be held on the African continent, and South Africa—whose political, social, and financial troubles are well documented—has a lot riding on the month-long event. Now, two days before the ref's whistle signals the start of the first game between South Africa and Mexico, World Cup madness has reached a hysterical pitch—both within the host country and in the far-flung corners of the globe. More » -
A flying kick at enlightenment
Whenever we post about martial-arts movies (or when Phil posts about Kill Bill) we get a few kneejerk criticisms for being sympathetic to—or at least tolerant of—representations of violence on the screen. There's a pretty basic formula for these films—flying kicks and extraordinary violence cut with shots of meditative practice or scenic recapitulations of spiritual lessons from the protagonist's early years with the master (remember Kung Fu?). Video games, too: I posted about the Karmapa's use of violent video games as "emotional therapy" and plenty found that practice pretty distasteful. More » -
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Go, Lakers!
I'll be in Boston at the end of next week so I hesitate to make this public. But what the heck, the title has already given me away: I'm a Lakers fan, and I couldn't be happier with the matchup. Lakers/Celtics has almost become a tradition, kind of like the Dodgers and the Yankees. But I'd like to make this post somehow Buddhist. So, in preparation for the game tonight, I suggest you read our 1994 interview with Phil Jackson here (granted, he was a Bull back then). More »
