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By Shanshan Zhao On March 21, 2016, the Buddhism and Contemporary Society at the University of British Columbia welcomed Dr. Mark Unno from the University of Oregon, with his guest lecture titled “Madness and Buddhist Compassion.” In his lecture, Dr. Unno examined various definitions of "madness" in both Western and Japanese contexts, its social impact … Continue reading [Blog] Madness and Buddhist Compassion – A Talk by Dr. Mark Unno (UBC, March 21, 2016)
By Ngoc Le On the night of March 22, scholars, Vancouver’s Buddhist community members and interested public attended Dr. Dzung X. Vo’s talk on mindful clinical therapy for adolescents and controversies surrounding secular mindfulness. Dr. Vo, MD, FAAP, is a pediatrician specializing in adolescent medicine at British Columbia Children’s Hospital, and clinical assistant professor at … Continue reading [Blog] The Mindful Teen: Secular and Buddhist Mindfulness for Adolescents – A Talk by Dr. Dzung X. Vo (UBC, March 22, 2016)
Hegemony is an understandably popular term these days—and remains important despite the potential for its overuse to the point of irrelevance. It refers, as I understand it, to the ability of certain ideas to be accepted as natural, and thereby to be invisible in their control of thinking. So much so that one is effectively a willing participant in the propagation of the systems of thought that dominate one’s thinking. (This is my own narrow focus of the much broader theorizing of Antonio Gramsci.)
“Religion” is just one such concept, and it continues to play an unconscious role in forming present-day ideas about Buddhism. One important way is in the oppositional pairing of religious and secular. Under this dichotomy, if one critiques Secular Buddhism (itself a different project from criticizing it, though some of its adherents don’t seem to recognize that difference), then the presumption is that one is in…
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