The University
“Education is our nation’s best defense.” –Venerable Master Hsuan Hua
What’s new at DRBU? Learn about our vision and hopes, get your fill of our latest events and classes, read reflections from students, faculty, staff and volunteers, and share your own thoughts about the university.
There is a growing segment in education that is beginning to take to this more broad-minded approach, to consider content and pedagogy that place considerations like enjoyment, aptitude, and economic decision-making factors into the context of a more systematic understanding. This movement is embraced by DRBU, but it is by no means limited to our institution. A recent article posted on the Harvard Crimson reports that “Ethical Reasoning 18: Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory is Harvard’s third most popular class.” Why so popular? [...]
How does a verse communicate all of its meanings to us? With midterm break just beginning, I'll be spending the week contemplating and reciting Guan Yin's name. In some sense I feel that for every session I have to reorient myself to practice, and of course, exactly what this means is different every time. Luckily, my recent classes have been providing a lot of food for thought. [...]
Last semester in a course here at DRBU, we compared William James’ Pragmatism to some of the views in Buddhist Sutras. Looking back on some of the topics of the course, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people who come to Buddhism are first interested in it for pragmatic reasons. … [...]
In a recent post about architecture and education, I explored a few questions about physical space, the space of the mind, what this has to do with learning, and how we might choose to construct educational spaces with these questions in mind. They originate with all parents’ concern for their children, a concern for our [...]
Daniel Kahnemann is a Noble laureate in economics and a psychologist at Princeton University. Dr. Kahnemann, in collaboration with others, is a major force in turning the discipline of psychology into the realm of science. In this discipline, the underlying, fuzzy-at-the-edges postulate by the pioneers of western psychology remains fairly intact: human beings are primarily [...]
Recently, the issue of student debt has once again come back to the forefront of public discourse. The New York Times did a fairly lengthy cover story on it. A chorus of commentators, including notable critic Mark Cuban, a media and tech mogul, has been even more vocal in comparing higher education to the last housing bubble. In some ways, this debate has been smoldering for the past 3 years about the true value of higher education. [...]
For Deleuze, time itself is always in the newness of our immediate experience. Any sense of time that we add to the present experience is a mental construct. But any mental construct is itself experienced in the newness of each moment. So as we realize ourselves foundationally, it’s always within this newness. We are constantly living in a tension created by the immediacy of sense experience and the meaning that we create through various mental constructs. [...]
Some years ago, while driving friends to Humboldt State University in the early morning mist, the road began to wind through majestic redwoods enveloped in fog. I was still sleepy and had to pay serious attention in order not to veer into a ditch or a tree. So I kept pointing out the beauty of the forest to my passengers who, with eyes closed, were chanting the name of Guan Yin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. We arrived safely, in good time and good cheer. Later I asked them why they had kept their eyes closed. “The forest is too beautiful,” was their answer. [...]