Events

In Search of an Authentic Engaged Buddhism:

Voices from Ancient Texts, Calls from the Modern World

Speakers:

Bhikkhu Bodhi
Buddhist monk, President of Buddhist Publication Society, and Translator

Raoul Birnbaum
Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz

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Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi is an American Buddhist monk from New York City, born in 1944. He obtained a BA in philosophy from Brooklyn College (1966) and a PhD in philosophy from Claremont Graduate School (1972). After completing his university studies he traveled to Sri Lanka, where he received novice ordination in 1972 and full ordination in 1973, both under Ven. Ananda Maitreya (1896-1998), a leading scholar-monk in Sri Lanka during the late twentieth century. From 1984 to 2002 he was the editor for the Buddhist Publication Society in Kandy, Sri Lanka, where he lived for ten years with the elder German monk, Ven. Nyanaponika Thera (1901-1994), at the Forest Hermitage. He returned to the U.S. in 2002. He currently resides at Chuang Yen Monastery in Carmel, N.Y., and teaches there and at Bodhi Monastery in northwest New Jersey. He is a religious adviser to the Buddhist Association of the United States. Ven. Bodhi has many important publications to his credit, either as author, translator, or editor, including A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma (1993), The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (Majjhima Nikaya, 1995), The Connected Discourses of the Buddha (Samyutta Nikaya, 2000), and In the Buddha's Words (2005). He is now working on a complete translation of the Anguttara Nikaya, The Incremental Discourses of the Buddha.

Raoul Birnbaum is professor of Buddhist Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz, where he also holds the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Chair in History of Art and Visual Culture. In addition to The Healing Buddha and Studies on the Mysteries of Mañjusri, he has written numerous articles on Chinese Buddhist practices and representations from medieval times to the present. In recent years he has been engaged in studies of the life of the great modern-era Chinese Buddhist monk Hongyi (1880-1942), and he also has organized a cooperative project on “Buddhists at the End of Life.” Birnbaum has studied extensively within Chinese Buddhist monastic environments for many years, especially on the China mainland. Above all, he has focused on long-term engagement with Buddhist perfection of wisdom literature and practices, following the lead of the learned and cultivated elder monk Miaojing (1930-2003), under whom he took Triple Refuge in 1971 in Hong Kong.