Da Buddha



Kenney, the professor, said essentially that most of the stuff we talked about today would not be needed for the class. Still, it was important background info that may be necessary to understand some of the later topics. Often, she would go off on short but interesting tangents. From time to time this made it hard to follow where she was going but I could tell that she knew a great deal about the subject and was restraining herself from talking at length about things not pertaining, in some vague way, to the class.

Anyway, back to the Buddha.

Buddha is from India, but at some point in the past, the Indian school of Buddhism died out. So, Buddha became Asian(East Asian, if you prefer). I guess it is kind of like how Jesus is often portrayed as a pale skinned white guy in many depictions from Europe. Buddha too changed to fit his audience and some of the slides-did I mention there were slides-showed Buddha in different cultural settings.

For instance, there is a statue of Buddha during his time of aceticism which shows his ribs, hips, sunken eyesockets, the works… it is moving if not alittle disturbing.

How this all relates back to Zen I am not sure yet, but I am sure it does. It is Zen Buddhism after all.

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