Mindful administration and other insights
Among its many other initiatives, Fo Guang Shan sponsors a University Presidents’ Forum each year in early November. FGS sponsors five HE institutions around the Pacific: Nan Hua and Fo Guang Universities, in Taiwan; Nan Tien Institute, in Wollongong, Australia; the University of the West in Los Angeles; and Guang Ming College near Manila, in the Philippines. Together these make up the FGS University Consortium, and they are a direct result of Ven. Hsing Yun’s profound commitment to education as right action within his wider vision of Humanistic Buddhism.
The purpose of the Forum is to bring together a group of experience university scholars and administrators as an advisory group for the FGS universities, but it also serves as a unique (I think) opportunity to stop and think about Buddhist higher education generally. Because FGS has a very good network worldwide, the range of scholars who participate is impressive: this year there were university presidents and senior academics from South Korea, Vietnam, India, the UK, Germany, the PRC, Japan, Belgium, Thailand Sri Lanka, Hungary, Bangladesh, Australia, the Philippines, Germany, Malaysia and the USA. We all come together in Taiwan and work together through formal panels and informal conversations.
That’s a huge spectrum of experience and contexts for Buddhist education, and the conversations are, to say the least, eye-opening. Ven. Hsing Yun has been extremely careful to cultivate good relations with the PRC, and while that is sometimes controversial, it does mean that the head of a large and productive Buddhist Studies group at Renmin University can discuss, within limits, the challenges they face with the head of a Buddhist Studies programme in California, another from Malaysia, a third from Hungary and a fourth from South Korea. In each case the framing of Buddhism within a wider national ideology creates serious constraints and openings; in each case the educational leaders derive support and insight from each other. The presence of senior Buddhist Studies scholars from around the world guarantees that the actual debates around Buddhist principles are held quite strictly to good evidence. There is little waffle and no BS, though there is quite a bit of positive encouragement and support.
The five FGS institutions, their leaders and key scholars, treat this forum with tremendous attention, and they are very different institutions indeed. Nan Tien Institute, which is a postgraduate only institution for now, is developing a remarkable pedagogy around mindful university practices. This includes mindful teaching and cultivating compassion for carers, as well as teaching mindfulness. In a wonderful aside the president, Bill Lovegrove, admitted that they had not yet achieved mindful and compassionate administrative meetings. What a proposal: to have mindful, compassionate meetings of the Research Committee or the Admissions Committee!
Given the strength of the nuns’ sangha within Fo Guang Shan, my friends and colleagues within FGS were very keen to hear about Asian University for Women and immediately promised to help support any graduating students who wanted to go on to pursue postgraduate study in Buddhist Studies. AUW, by virtue of its location in Chittagong, has in its immediate and wider catchment potential students from a number of different Buddhist communities and there were discussions, which I hope bear long-term fruit, about supporting women from those communities to find leadership roles as Buddhist women. Moreover, AUW has the potential, if supported, to be a dynamic centre for research into Buddhism in Asia, both as a social and historical phenomenon, and as a value or virtue framework informing transdisciplinary work across gender rights, ecology, public health, politics and other fields. For me, though, the simple possibility of stopping for a while to reflect on what it means to cultivate the ideals of Buddhist education was a very welcome break from the challenges of developing my role as a professor within AUW.
